Why Catholics Should Embrace Bitcoin (Guest: Devin Rose)

[00:00:10] Speaker A: Bitcoin's price is rising again. Now there's talk the United States might set up a strategic bitcoin reserve. But our question is, should Catholics embrace bitcoin or hold it in suspicion? That's what we're going to talk about today on Christopher Hill. I'm Eric Sims, your host, air in chief of Crisis magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage you to smash that like button, like the bitcoin price is about to smash 100,000. I want you subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. You can follow us on social media at Crisis Mag. You can also go to our website to subscribe to our email newsletter. Just go to crisis magazine.com Put your email address subscribe to our newsletter. You get a email each day with our articles for the day. I try to think up something different for that Smash comment and I thought that was a pretty good one. [00:00:59] Speaker B: I like that one. [00:01:01] Speaker A: So our guest today is Devin Rose. He is the author of several books. I remember I heard of Devin long ago. I think it was the Process Dilemma. I think that's what it was. The Protestant's Dilemma. Navigating the Tiber, two of his books. He's a the developer of the Prey Catholic Novenas app. So I establish all your Catholic cred here. First, you have your first novel out this year which I recently read called Chasing the Seeds, which ties in both cat there it is both Catholic and bitcoin themes and it was recently published and it's very good. It's. And I like it particularly because it's the first in a series. So I was like good, I can keep on reading this as the next one's coming out. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But welcome to program, Devin. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Thank you, Eric. Long time friends and first time I think we've been on this together. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Yeah. So yeah, Devin and I go way back and like it wasn't through bitcoin, it was through Catholic stuff. And then like somehow I think what was your first book that like you self published and then Catholic Answers picked it up. Which one was that? [00:02:05] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. You've got a really great memory actually and not many people recall this, but yeah, the very first one was if Protestantism's True. [00:02:13] Speaker A: That's right. [00:02:14] Speaker B: This was self published in the early days of the blogosphere and then Catholic Answers turned it into the Protestants Dilemma. [00:02:21] Speaker A: Okay. So the name changed. Okay. Because I have if Protestantism is True somewhere around here because I think I was living in Florida and when was that published like, maybe 10 years ago, something like that. [00:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah, probably 12 or 13 years ago. [00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So great book. Great book. And I'm not surprised. Catholic answers and picked it up. I was excited when that happened because it's. It's a good. It's a good, solid book for just like, basic apologetics for, you know, understanding Protestantism. And I assume. Boy, I should notice. I assume that you were Protestant at one point. Right? [00:02:51] Speaker B: I was in. But. But only briefly. So I was. Grew up atheist, and then I spent Protestants probably would make them mad. I spent about a year and a half to two years in Protestantism before realizing the Catholic faith is true and became Catholic all by the grace of God. [00:03:07] Speaker A: Right. [00:03:08] Speaker B: But. But yeah. And I think that you and I were probably friends through the Catholic blogosphere, first in its heyday, from 06 to. Yeah, 2013 or something. [00:03:18] Speaker A: We're giving away our age a little bit here. Yeah, right here talking. Yeah, right, exactly. Talking about these hip new technologies like Bitcoin, but we're the old fogies of it, so. Yeah. And so, like. So your atheist grew up, and then you were Protestant for a while, and then you became Catholic. And so how long. How long have you been in the church then? [00:03:34] Speaker B: Believe it or not, I'm now. I crested a milestone 23 years as a Catholic, and I became Catholic at 23. And so I've now spent the majority of my life as a Catholic. So that's some credibility. [00:03:47] Speaker A: Okay. You're definitely a nerd like me because I literally did the same thing when I hit my halfway point of life as a Catholic. I marked. I think I put it on Facebook or something like that or Twitter or something, because I was also excited because I. I'll. How many years am I now? I'm 31 years. About 31 years in the church, so. Yeah. Which is way more than halfway. I'm not that old, people. [00:04:07] Speaker B: I was about to say, man. Eric. Wow. [00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it was years ago. I hit the halfway part. You know, I know I got the gray, but I'm not in the 60s yet. [00:04:14] Speaker B: But you're the only other person I've known who. Who thought of it that way. And so that is a. Probably some sort of nerdy litmus test. [00:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So is your background as a software developer? [00:04:26] Speaker B: It is, yeah. I got my degree in electrical engineering, but then went right into software. Worked in the Austin tech world for 20 years as a software engineer. Got to be a little bit of an old fogey. And so then I decided I better be a Manager of software engineers, which is what I do now. [00:04:43] Speaker A: Okay, okay. Yeah, we have similar backgrounds. I was a software engineer for many years, about 15 years or so before I moved over into Catholic stuff all the time. So. And that, that's kind of applicable to today's podcast topic, which is bitcoin. Obviously it's the technology. So when did you first kind of get involved with. With bitcoin? [00:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I first got involved with it in 2015. I heard about it before that, but thought, oh, this is stupid. You know, the main site was Mount Gox and I played Magic the Gathering. And so whenever it was a website named after Magic the Gathering, I was. [00:05:20] Speaker A: Like, can't be that serious. [00:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And then it. And then it crashed from twelve hundred, you know, to a hundred dollars with the Mount Gox implosion. And I thought I was so smart. I was like, oh yeah. I didn't. I knew that was a scam. [00:05:31] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:05:32] Speaker B: Yeah. But then it was our mutual friend Brantley Milligan. [00:05:36] Speaker A: Brantley. Shout out to Brantley. I knew he'd come up somehow. [00:05:39] Speaker B: He needs to come up. And he's going to be an interesting case for us to talk about later. Possibly we might have to do one where he comes on the show because, you know, I call myself a bitcoin maxi and he's definitely not a bitcoin maxi. [00:05:52] Speaker A: That's right. And we'll have to explain that to the, to the newcomers here, what we mean by that. But yeah, yeah, Brantley. So Branton Milligan, great guy. My son in law actually does work for him. Yeah. So he's just a great guy, but very. He's a strong Catholic. I think he just had, I think his wife just had their eighth kid, I think, I'm not even sure. Yeah, something like that. But been involved with cryptocurrency, bitcoin, all that stuff for years and just, you know, he's crushing it. Just doing a great job. But why don't we go kind of move back a little bit. We're already using our internal words, you know, bitcoin maxis and stuff like that. So before we go too much in and we lose everybody, all the newcomers here, why don't we just start basically like what bitcoin is the more important. Like why did you then you said you initially dismissed it. Why did you then embrace it? Like, what about it? What's like the selling point of bitcoin to you? [00:06:46] Speaker B: Yeah, when I as a programmer and I realized, oh, this is a peer to peer program and so the computers talk to each other. There's not a central server somewhere. And they figured out how you could have this bitcoin token that no one can control. It's how much bitcoin comes into the system is, you know, fixed by a computer algorithm. And so the computer program me and thought, oh, well, this is kind of cool. I wasn't yet on board with the, I thought our money was fine and, you know, use the dollar and America's the best. I mean, whatever. So that part of it hadn't dawned on me that, wait a second, they keep inflating our money and stealing from us. That came after I bought bitcoin and once I bought it too. This is kind of what happens to some people. I didn't care about it, but once I bought it, now you got some skin in the game and you kind of start watching the price and then you start watching news and then if it goes up a lot. I'd always been interested in finance and had stocks and such. If your Stock goes up 15% in a year, you're. Yeah. Wow, man, this is awesome. Well, bitcoin would go up 15 in a day, right? And that got my attention. So it started off real slowly. As to how I then dipped my toes in bitcoin, I just had a little bit. Yeah. How about you? Is that similar, Eric? [00:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah, well, actually it's interesting because I got started in 2013 and I'm also a technical guy. And what was interesting about bitcoin is it was the convergence of two interests of mine, economics and technology. I've always been kind of an economics geek. I just, I've read a lot about economics. I don't claim to be some expert or I don't have a PhD or anything like that, but I've loved reading about economics and studying. I'm actually teaching an economics class to a homeschool co op right now. And so that's been very fun for me. And, and like, I, I very much ended up falling into the Austrian School of Economics, which for people who don't understand, there's different schools of economics, how they understand how the economy works, things like that. The Austrian school is the one that essentially would be very much, when it comes to money, they very much be for hard money, like gold and silver. Like traditionally they would very much advocate for that. They'd be very much against things like the Federal Reserve printing money, governments printing money, things like that. And they have lots of arguments against it. So I fell into that. And so I was into, you know, I, you know, gold and Silver and things like that, but also as a technology nerd. And so when I heard about bitcoin, it was through, I think a Tom woods podcast, I think, with Eric Voorhees I think is who it was. For anybody who knows who these people are, Tom woods, you might know who he is for a lot of people might out there know who he is. And all of a sudden I was like, wait a sec, this was in 2013. And so it just shot up to a thousand. And it had been like hanging out under a hundred for a long time. And all of a sudden it shot to a thousand. And I was like. So I did, I did the deep dive where you just go down the rabbit hole, you start reading everything you can, you get on the forums, you find out. And I was like, wow, this is cool economically because it's basically modeled after a digital equivalent of gold is the philosophy behind it. But then technologically I had been involved my software development, all Internet based. And so the whole peer to peer decentralized stuff is very familiar to me. I mean, I remember I was involved with actually the first company that ever offered web hosting software. Like if anybody has a website and they use a control panel online to control their website, I was actually part of the company that did, was the first people who created those. And this is like in the 90s. And so like the whole decentralized. I understood that decentralization works technologically. Like it can solve a lot of problems. And so when I saw that bitcoin was essentially a decentralized way to transfer value from one person to another, it did click with me. And I thought, this is great. Now I will say I was most excited at first about it as a currency, using it to actually spend money. In fact, I've said this before, I don't know if it's on this podcast. I have spent probably over 30 bitcoin in my life. [00:11:18] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:11:19] Speaker A: Thank you for that. Chuckle. Yeah, because when I first got involved with bitcoin, I was trying to use it to as a currency. I wanted it to be something people would. You'd spend. And so I had a debit card that directly pulled bitcoin out. And so I'd buy things with bitcoin, like I'd be at the. At Home Depot or whatever and I'd buy something with bitcoin directly. And so I used a lot like that. And so just so people know people, I don't have anywhere near that much because I spent most of it. I mean that's the funny thing. Is. And like, it's, like it's okay because at the time that's what I knew, that's what I was excited about. And I think that things like that help bring it about to where it is today. I'm not saying I'm not taking credit for it, but I'm just saying like people like me who are using it and stuff help bring it to the masses more. And so, so really I, I really. And it wasn't until a couple years ago I really started to see it more as kind of the, the digital gold. So why don't you kind of, why don't you break down then kind of how bitcoin is modeled after gold? I said that. But why don't you kind of break down what that means? [00:12:26] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. And, and before I jump into that, the way that something kind of becomes money, there's four stages. It's a collectible, then it's a store value like gold, which is where we're at now. Then it's a medium of exchange, which is what we all wanted it to be a little bit prematurely. And then finally it's a unit of account which we're not there yet. But a lot of people got disillusioned because it wasn't easy to use as a currency and that's what they were banking on. So, you know, gold, you mine gold out of the ground because God put it there. And we mine a certain amount every year. And it goes from being in the ground into, you know, the stock that people have. And then it's, you know, it has industrial uses, but it's also used for jewelry. And people do use it as money too, or a store of value. Even central banks, even though central banks can print dollars at will, they all have gold in their vaults for some reason. You know, it's very interesting, but the, and there's a certain rate at which gold is pulled out of the ground. Generally the higher the gold price, the more gold miners are incentive incentivized to mine it. And so that percent can actually increase the amount of, if you will, inflation of gold that's above ground. So bitcoin is similar in that, you know, God didn't make it. It's a man made invention by a pseudonymous person named Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows who he is, but there's a fixed amount, 21 million Bitcoin that will ever exist. And Satoshi came up with this proof of work where computers mine bitcoin and mines in quotes by solving what amounts to a pointless Algorithm. And whoever solves it the best or the fastest gets the next little block of bitcoin that's mined into existence. Well, it's very clever, though, because every four years, that amount is cut in half. So it started off as 50. Bitcoin every 10 minutes was mined into the world. And now we're at. What are we at? Are we at 3 or 1.6? [00:14:41] Speaker A: I think we're at the 3. [00:14:43] Speaker B: Okay. [00:14:43] Speaker A: I think we just. Because, remember, we had the having back in March, and that dropped from six to three. [00:14:49] Speaker B: 2512. Six. Okay, so three. Right. And so now the. The amount of bitcoin, new bitcoin that comes into the world every year compared with the amount of bitcoin that's already been mined is actually makes it scarcer than gold in a stock to flow ratio is what they. They've called it. I know that we're getting a little technical, but it does mirror gold in that sense. And so the comparison is digital. Gold is pretty apropos, don't you think? [00:15:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I think one of. One of the things I learned when I was studying economics on my own, especially the Austrian school, on the origin of money, I just kind of what I think a lot of people think is like gold and silver, they just ended up kind of coincidentally as the most common use, the most common money and stores of value. I didn't realize it was. Actually there's. There's a reason why literally every culture on earth that develops to a certain point always, always adopts gold and silver as money. And I think that's because of their characteristics. And the funny thing is, my economics class I'm teaching right now, we literally just. Our last lesson was on money and the origin of money. And what you see is money always has certain good money always has certain properties. So it can be easily divided and, and it can be carried around. It can be, you know, transferred. It keeps its value. It's scarce. That's a key part. It's scarce. It's fungible, meaning it like one gold coin is worth the same as another gold coin. They're not like, different. All these are characteristics that made silver and gold money. It wasn't like somebody from on high said gold is going to be the money for every culture. No, every culture realized gold just works out great and so does silver. And one of the main things is something you talked. You mentioned was the stock to flow ratio, which is just a technical term for how much is there, how much stock is there, and how much is being added to it. Each Year, whatever, in gold, because it's hard to mine. You cannot produce. You can't all of a sudden produce, you know, a. Like a. You can't double the amount of gold in the world overnight. It's just impossible. You can double the amount of dollars in the world that actually is possible to. And, in fact, they seem to be doing that all the time. And same thing with silver. And so that's important because now what you have, it makes it hard money. It makes it so that it can't be artificially inflated, which devalues the value of it. I mean, the funny thing is how Americans, and probably, I guess, everybody around the world does this. We grow up just assuming things cost more in the future than they do in the past. Like, you hear your mom say, oh, yeah, milk was, you know, 50 cents a gallon or a dollar a gallon or something like that. And now, I think, like, six or seven dollars a gallon or something like that. And like, people just like, yeah, that's just the way it is. Almost like it's a economic law of nature. But that's only because the money is getting inflated, which means it getting devalued. So $1 today is worth less than it was a year ago or 100 years ago. So. So that's a very important aspect of gold. And so when Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin, he consciously knew all this and consciously designed the program purposefully to mimic gold. Now, he did see it as a currency immediately because of the. It's easier to transact bitcoin than is in gold. If I want to pay you for something in gold, it's a hassle because you're in Texas, I'm in Ohio. If I wanted to pay you in something in bitcoin, and you ain't getting my bitcoin, But I was going to say anytime, Eric. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. If I wanted to pay for something to you in bitcoin, it literally takes. Takes, you know, just a couple seconds to do it, and it's. It's settled, and you have it very quickly. And so I think that's. That. That's what we're talking about. What the kind of the value of the intentional design of bitcoin to make it mimic gold. So it would be this good store of value. And store value just simply means that it will maintain its value over time. So the US Dollar is one of the worst stores of value. Think about it. Take a thousand dollars, put it under your mattress, come back in 50 years, and you're not getting much with it. I mean, it's going to be completely devalued. [00:19:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And by the way, on that, those qualities of money, I really like Mike Maloney's from GoldSilver.com's Secret History of Money videos. You probably have seen them, Eric. So he's a, he's a gold silver broker guy? [00:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. [00:19:19] Speaker B: And he has, he has this video series, just search for Mike Maloney. Kind of like spelled like baloney. It's really good because he then goes into how all the, all the empires of the world have fallen in part because they begin devaluing and debasing. [00:19:35] Speaker A: Oh, I have seen this series. [00:19:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really, it's really a great series. And speaking of the inflation thing, so here's a book called, by Jeff Booth called the Price of Tomorrow that Eric, I'm sure you've heard of seen Jeff Booth before. [00:19:48] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:19:50] Speaker B: And his whole thesis is about how with all the technological improvements that we have, things should be getting cheaper over time, not more expensive. It's only because they are proliferating the dollar and debasing the currency to steal from us through the hidden tax of inflation. That stuff is more expensive every year in spite of the tremendous productivity gains we've had, technological advances we've had and you know, caveat. You know, Jeff is not Catholic. He, he has some, he's from Canada. No offense to all the Canadians, but he takes some shots at like, I don't know, stuff that we as Catholics would, would disagree with. But we take the good from things and things we disagree with. Hey, that's fine, right? [00:20:38] Speaker A: I also think I want to tie it right now into the Catholic US Being Catholic. And this is important because we talk a lot about Catholic social teaching. We have, the bishops talk a lot about Catholic social teaching. They talk about economics a lot. And they give these. But I have yet to see one Catholic bishop ever talk about the immorality of the Fed. And what do I mean by that? Specifically? That when they create money out of thin air. And by the way, for the technical people out there, I know the Fed doesn't literally print money. It's all very. But the end result is they're, they're injecting more currency into the system, more dollars into the system. But the point is, is that that is a form of theft. It's truly stealing. And so it's immoral in my opinion, when they create new money. Because also what happens is if you look how it works, it enriches the people closest to the Money printers first, I mean, primarily, and then the poor, the people, and even the middle class downstream, they're the ones who basically they don't get the benefits of the extra money, but they do get the cost of it. And I feel like that should be something. Catholics should really be, you know, screaming from the rooftops that this is an immoral practice. Not just is it bad economically for the country, whatever, but it really does. It is a, is a form of theft. Really. [00:22:06] Speaker B: Yeah, in the most egregious form because most people, it's invisible to most people. They don't see it. [00:22:12] Speaker A: Right. [00:22:13] Speaker B: I so, I mean, Eric, I could not agree with you more. And I only think that our bishops, they're just not savvy enough and they're about three steps behind this. [00:22:28] Speaker A: Right. I mean, I do think it's ignorance more than anything else. I don't think that they know all this and then they refuse to say something. I honestly think they just, I think most people are ignorant of this. [00:22:37] Speaker B: Right. And so. Right. And so they, it's fooled them. And yet of all the things about helping the poor and helping, you know, the marginalized people and oh, look at all these terrible wars. Well, guess what? The fact that we can proliferate money like this is what allows us to fund these never ending wars and allows us to steal from all of the people, enriching the richer people, which as Eric knows that that is, that's called the Cantillon Effect. The people closest to the money printer. [00:23:06] Speaker A: Couldn'T remember the name, but that's what it is. [00:23:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it looks like Cantillion, but I don't think there's an I at the end. So I think it's Cantil on. But you know, they get a shot at using the money first before it goes out to everyone and all the prices rise and so they get to use it. So it is, I don't know, maybe in a hundred years or something people will, maybe in 100 years bishops will know about all these topics and they'll speak out against them. But not to say that we're prophetic, but I do think in a way it's going to be us. You know, we, we like, we lay Catholics who are talking about this now, raising the awareness to where, you know, priests and bishops will eventually say, and even the Pope, oh yeah, this was the biggest theft of all time, central banking. And we as Catholics didn't stand up against it and everyone got robbed and got poor. [00:24:07] Speaker A: Right. [00:24:08] Speaker B: I hope so. [00:24:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Here's another example of how it harms the poor the most. The poor are typically the least sophisticated as far as being able to manage their money. And they're also had the least access to investment vehicles and things like that. In a hard money system, like gold for example, or bitcoin, they, they would be able to basically just, they earn their gold, they put a little bit aside. And when I say gold, I'm not saying gold coins. I, I understand there's systems where you have paper money that represents gold, but it actually represents gold, not, you know, the, the reserve, the, the, the way we've done it in the past, in past 100 years or more. But they can save it. They can say, okay, I'm putting aside 5% of my hard earned income. I'm, I'm a dad, I'm supporting my family, I'm not making a lot of money, but I need to like save for rainy day. I need to say. And so when I, they put it away, they know they literally could put it under their mattress and they know in 10 years it's still at least going to be worth as much as when they started, probably going to be worth more. They're, and what I really mean by that is their purchasing power is more, they can buy more in 10 years than they can today. If they do that with dollars, they, they're going to lose out. And so what happens is the people who don't have access to these different vehicles, investment vehicles and things like that, they end up becoming even poorer over time. And also what it really is doing in America, it's forcing people into risky investments. Nobody wants a savings account at the bank because they know it's below inflation. You're not even making as much as inflation is and so you're actually losing money. So then they had to go into stocks and things like that and get more and more speculative, which is not a good, that's. That, that should not be the standard. I'm not against investments and stuff like that. I'm just saying though, for a lower middle class person, for example, they shouldn't need to do stock trading in order just to stay afloat, not even get ahead, but just stay afloat. And that's essentially what they have to do now. And so hard money like gold, like bitcoin is really. So I really do feel like it's a social, a social, it ties into Catholic social teaching a lot, I think. I know you see sometimes Catholics, they talk about usury today, like, you know, in our circles, but I feel like the central banking of the debasement of currency. That is, you know, the. A true form of usury where you really are stealing, you know, you're stealing from the poor to give to the rich is what you end up doing. [00:26:49] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. And you. And just their purchasing power should increase over time. And if they did, it would actually incentivize people to become savers. [00:26:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:26:59] Speaker B: In our system, savers are punished. [00:27:02] Speaker A: Yes, right. [00:27:02] Speaker B: Instead you should consider they want us to consume, which is also against Catholic teaching. To be just a consumer and throw away culture and all of this. It fuels so much stuff downstream. That's just terrible. [00:27:15] Speaker A: I think that's a great point about the whole consumer culture we have, because a lot of Catholics rightly decry our consumerist culture, and they should. But think of it. If I said to you, Devin, I can give you $100 today, and in a year it's going to be worth $80. When are you more likely to spend it? Now or in the future? You're going to spend it now probably because you know it's devaluing. If I said to you, though, Devin, this hundred dollars is going to be worth 120 in a year, you're much more, less. You're going to be a lot slower to spend. You're going to still spend for necessities. It's not like you stop spending. You need food, you need, you know, clothing and housing and all that stuff, but you are less likely to maybe get that impulse purchase that's you're kind of like, well, why would I get this impulse purchase? And I don't know about you, but, like being somebody involved with bitcoin, I found that has. That has stopped me from making purchases because I'm like, I could put this into bitcoin and save and I know it's gonna be worth more in the future. Or I could buy this thing that really gives me a little bit of entertainment or happens for like a couple, you know, for a day or two and then really am I really. Do I really care now? To be honest, I still buy books like crazy, but other than that, you know. But the point is, is like it naturally, then it creates a more moral environment, in my opinion. [00:28:37] Speaker B: Yes. [00:28:38] Speaker A: Well. [00:28:39] Speaker B: And the phrase we use for that in bitcoin terms or in economic terms is time preference. Yes, right. We have a low time preference, which we. Which means like, we're willing to forego gratification now for the future. Which, when you think about it, that's very Catholic because we as Catholics in our life, what's the future thing we're looking toward heaven, right? Therefore we deny ourselves now of not only just sinful pleasures, but also even of legitimate pleasures, right? Think about Lent, when we deny ourselves in different ways or even an advent, because there's something greater that we're working toward. And I actually did a little game theory. So four of my nieces and nephews graduated from high school. I sent them a graduation gift and decided to send them bitcoin. So I explained to them what it was, got them set up with an account, and I sent them some bitcoin and said you could sell it now and just cash it out and go buy that thing you want. But you know, you might want to wait some number of months and see if it's worth more than. And from what I gave it to them to now, it would be worth 50% more. So if it were $200, it's now worth $300. Interestingly, one of them sold, ignored what I said and instantly sold it and liquidated it and took the cash. [00:29:58] Speaker A: Hey, it's fine, right? [00:30:00] Speaker B: It's fine. The other three I'm going to message because I'm really curious. It's a little bit of an experiment, but I want to instill that in them because especially you say college age and it could help to form them and think, oh yeah, wow, I'm going to lower my time preference and think more long term and think about all that that could benefit them in their. [00:30:25] Speaker A: Life and think about how radically different that is from the standard of consumers. And debt, like the debt in this country is just ridiculous. I mean, obviously I'm not talking about government, I'm talking about individual individuals. Debt is crazy. And that's what happens. You go off to college, you get huge college loans, and then as soon as you go off into the workforce, you're spending more than you're making. Your credit card debt is going like crazy. You're getting a car loan, you have to get a house bigger than you can afford. All these things happen and you're just crushed by this debt. And I mean, I think we both know for a fact this has a real world, like spiritual impact on people. I mean, our Lord talks about money a lot and for a reason. Because debt and money problems often causes a lot of strife in marriages. It can cause, it can lead people to withhold the gift of life. Like not wanting to have children, often through immoral means, being through moral means, like, you know, naturally playing like you're kind of holding back because you're so much in debt. You can't afford. But if you're, if you're, if your whole attitude is, okay, I'm saving, I'm not spending now. But it's. Our system rewards consumers. And so that's why getting off of this system, getting off of the fiat standard, fiat just, you know, for dollars, to the bitcoin standard or the gold standard in your mind. I think that there's a reason why two Catholics here are talking about this on a Catholic podcast. It's not just because we're bitcoin geeks. We are. But because it really does have a real world impact. Now. I feel like that's, to me, that's the number one kind of selling point for bitcoin is that not that number go up, not that it's going to be worth a ton in the future, but simply your purchasing power will go up in dollar terms because the fact that the dollar is going down in value often. And so you can save, you can be responsible. I mean, it's funny because my dad, I wrote a book on bitcoin. Bitcoin basics came, you know, it's outdated a little bit now. It's like nine years old. I really want to write a new edition, but I just haven't had time by daycare to my father because he knew nothing about bitcoin. I mean, he didn't know any of that technology stuff. He wasn't like an economist. He wasn't into like the gold standard Austrian economics. However, from day, as long as I can remember, he taught me the value of savings and the value of being frugal with your money, not, not spending more than you have. I mean, I have a funny story I like to tell is when I got my first credit card in high school and he co signed for it, you know, and it was like a 500 lender, something like that. He didn't tell me that you didn't have to pay off the whole balance each month. He made it seem like I had to pay it off each month. I literally had. I had a credit card for years. I think I was in college, I might even graduate from college before I finally realized. Like, I finally looked at the sheet where it said minimum payment, you know, 25, whatever. Like, wait, what does that mean? I, I mean, I literally had a credit card for years where I realized you didn't have to pay off the whole thing. That's because in my dad's mind, you did have to pay off the whole thing every single month. And that's of course, what I taught my kids. And and so like that mentality of savings and, and you know, it's a very moral way of doing things. It's the right way of living. But our system does penalize it before, at least before bitcoin came around. And so I think that's the number one thing. But I, I want to also talk about the censorship, censorship resistant aspect of Bitcoin and why this should matter for Catholics. So tell us a bit about like, you know, how bitcoin is organized, that government can like, can government come in and basically shut it down? Can it control it? You know, what is Bitcoin's kind of use case when it comes to free speech? And as Catholic, avoiding government, you know, oversight. [00:34:20] Speaker B: Yeah, overreach. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Overreach. [00:34:24] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So because Bitcoin is this peer to peer network of computers running all over the world, there's no central server to shut down. And that means even if the government in the US said we're going to destroy every computer running Bitcoin in the US the bitcoin network would still function. And all the different nodes in the world, it's almost like this little self healing, you know, network of neurons. So the government can't stop it. Probably if all the governments had colluded 15 years ago or 12 years ago, they could have, if they all got together, led by the US and said, we're crushing this. And they probably should have done that, but they're not smart enough. That's fortunate for us. But they didn't. And now it's, you know, the cat's out of the bag. So because of that then, because there's no centralized party, you know, if I try to send you money through the bank and it goes to the banking system. Well, if you, or if I've been secretly flagged as a domestic bad guy by, you know, one of the three letter agencies, you know, maybe because we're traditional Catholics or because we're Catholic. Right. Well then guess what? You can't send money and your bank account might get closed. Well, with Bitcoin, I can send it to anyone that I want. It goes through the network and it, it can't be stopped. Now governments can try to regulate it in different ways. They can disincentivize it by taxing it heavily or, you know, other, other ways of making it onerous, which our government has partially done. Right, right. There's some partial things that make it onerous. In other countries, it's even more onerous. But stopping that underlying decentralized network, you're. They're you know, they'd just be playing whack a mole and never be able to. To snuff it out. And so that's a big, A big benefit that bitcoin brings, especially if you are in a jurisdiction where, you know, our government's kind of bad enough, but there's other governments that are even worse. [00:36:30] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And I think, I think all of us, we realize, especially when Biden was president, that the government can turn very quickly against us as Catholics. And we saw the FBI was literally investigating traditional Catholics in this country just a year ago. I'm hopeful that they're all going to stop under Trump. I think it will. But I think, though, there's nothing to say that in five years it won't go back to that and we're the enemy again. And so it's not just theory always. And in other parts of the country, it's been real where bitcoin has allowed people to have freedom, where they, Their government was very oppressive. And I, you know, I think that's a good thing. So I think that's important for Catholics to be supportive of bitcoin for that reason as well, because it does give us the ability to circumvent unjust governments, essentially. Now, like you said, they can still do a lot like it can. They can really make all the on ramps, off ramps, I should say, you know, where you want to convert cryptocurrency to dollars to spend, or they can make that very difficult. And it's not, it's not a panacea. It's not a utopia we're living in. But at the same time, there have been real world examples over the past 10 years and more of people in countries where they were able to use crypto. It really did help them. I mean, people have literally escaped from, like, Afghanistan, for example, right. Where they had, they basically had their, Their, their. Their seed and they, and that's all they had on them. And they had to escape with no, none of their possessions. And they got to, like, Germany or whatever, and all of a sudden they were able to access all their, all their Bitcoin. And that's huge. I mean, that's just that. That's huge. [00:38:09] Speaker B: So, I mean, in, in Eric, and that's because, of course, as you and I know, your, Your private key, which is this long string of, you know, hexadecimal numbers and letters, is your secret Bitcoin address that no one else knows unless you tell them. Right, right. And you can even memorize it, even can be made into this Seed phrase, that's either 12 words or. Or 24 words. So anyway, if you can memorize 12 words, which almost anyone can, you can take your entire net worth around you all over the world. Try to go through an Airport with $10,000 of cash or gold bars worth, you know, $5,000 or maybe a little more than that. But you'll be stopped, you'll be questioned. We're even questioned. Now, if you go to the bank and you want to withdraw 10,000 bucks, and they're like, well, what are you going to use it for? You're depositing 10,000 bucks. They're like, where'd you get this? [00:39:02] Speaker A: It's like, yeah, the banks are required by law. Any transaction over $10,000, they have to flag it for the three letter agencies. And in fact, if you try to get around it by having a bunch of $9,900 ones, they're going to flag that, too. [00:39:17] Speaker B: Yeah, don't try to be secret. This even happened when I tried to pay, just briefly, I tried to pay down my mortgage. I came into a little bit of money, and I thought, I'm going to put, you know, some money down on my mortgage and pay the principal down. And it was stopped because it was too much money, you know, whatever, 7,000. I don't know how much it was. And they were like, well, you can't do that. And I was like, well, how am I supposed to pay down my principal? You know, we, as Catholics, too, you alluded to usury. We're usually on the receiving end of usury. [00:39:51] Speaker A: Right? [00:39:51] Speaker B: We're usually the ones paying the usurious money to other people. I mean, we're getting slammed. And you don't really hear bishops talking about that as much either. Like, hey, if something like bitcoin could get us out of a usurious system where we're getting taken advantage of left and right. Wow, that would be great to have. [00:40:12] Speaker A: Now, one of the things, I don't know if this happens to you, but when people find out I'm like a bitcoin guy, I'm cryptocurrency, all that stuff, I often have somebody come up to me and they'll say, hey, what do you think about? And it'll be some coin that I'm not going to say what we call that because this is a family podcast. People can look that up, but they'll, you know, some. Some coin, some project. And, like, what do you think about that? And what I all always, always say is just simply, like, well, you know, honestly, I Haven't done the research. I just stick with Bitcoin and maybe a few others that are well established. But what's your attitude? Because the fact is, here's how for people to understand the technical. Bitcoin is open source software. What that means is literally anybody can look at every single line of code in Bitcoin, which is its strength, because if somebody would have found an exploit, a hack or something, they would have found long ago. But it also means people can just copy it. You can copy the bitcoin code. Slap. You know, I could call it Salmon's coin and make one or two little changes, like maybe instead 21 million coins it will create, you know, I don't know, a hundred million coins or and maybe a couple other little things. And all of a sudden I got myself a cryptocurrency. And so the fact is, is like there's now, I don't even. I lost track long ago. Thousands and thousands of cryptocurrencies. Some of them have been around for a long time, like Ethereum and have a lot of people. Our friend Brantley, you know, is very involved with Ethereum. There's other ones like that. They've been Cardano and, you know, just Solano. I mean, they really are being used a lot. Some are just obviously 100 scams. Some are good ideas that just don't have in a lot of ways, but they really just don't work or whatever. What's your general attitude towards all the cryptocurrency universe outside of Bitcoin? [00:41:58] Speaker B: Bitcoin, yeah. Yeah. And I went through, I went through a journey which Eric, maybe Will, you also did of. I was first bitcoin, only that was bitcoin, Ethereum. And then I learned about these other alternative tokens. Alt coins. [00:42:14] Speaker A: That's what we'll call them. [00:42:15] Speaker B: That's what we'll call them. And then I owned like 30 of them or 40 of them or who, who knows? I could barely keep track of it. And then eventually I realized, oh, and for me, I thought what these other projects are primarily software tech projects, software tech startups. And some of them might end up being successful. So far, the vast majority have not been, you know, and to justify needing your own different blockchain is a big hurdle to overcome because there's a, there's a big deal with trying to set up your own blockchain or even to say, I need my own token to accomplish xyz. We're going to do, you know, Uber, but it's going to be on blockchain well, what, what's blockchain giving you there? You know. And then another aspect too in, in Eric, you also are familiar with this. A lot of these tokens have now moved to a proof of stake mechanism rather than a proof of work mechanism like bitcoin has. And the proof of work is these mining machines have to try to solve the problem. They race each other. And even if I have a million bitcoin like Satoshi Nakamoto, it gives me no extra power over the network, no extra power to get more tokens. But with proof of stake, it's kind of like a plutocracy or where whoever has the most tokens, they end up staking them and then they get even more. So most of them, including Ethereum, which is the number two, has moved proof of stake, which I view as a really fatally bad move. Other people disagree. [00:43:56] Speaker A: Right. [00:43:57] Speaker B: And so any other thing that I'd be interested in, I would want to see that it was proof of work and it would need to. In my view, Bitcoin has cornered the market now on as a financial asset, cryptocurrency. It's the one and only financial store of value, future money. But that's not to say there couldn't be another project down the line that could use a proof of work blockchain and do something that was really important, vital, whatever. I haven't ruled that out. Some bitcoin maxis have ruled that out. So what do you think? [00:44:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I'm with you a lot. I think a couple things. First of all, from like 2013 to about 2015, I was Bitcoin only in my. Because I wanted it to be the solution to everything. I want it to be, you know, the currency that you see. I mean, like I said, I was literally spending it, you know, all the time. I bring that up So I don't cry. [00:44:54] Speaker B: 30 Bitcoin. [00:44:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Bye bye Bitcoin. But. But then from about 2017 to about 2019, 20, I was very much into the altcoins and a lot of different projects. Ethereum, there's one called Dash. I was really, I was actually. I was literally part of the team and everything with it. And it was, you know, there's a lot of good people involved with it and I think they had good motives, good good intentions and all that. I don't. It wasn't a scam, in other words, because I think some of them are, but a lot of them aren't. And I think it's too easily people call things scams when really they just might mean failure. I mean, people fail. I mean, businesses. More businesses fail than succeed. So. But around 20, 20 or so, I did start to come more around to realizing, okay, there's some reasons why bitcoin is different from all the rest. And some of them I almost resisted. I didn't want to believe this. Like, for example, it's first and so, like that that doesn't seem fair that that makes a different difference. But it does because it gives us the network effect. It gives it the fact that that's the one everybody decided. I mean, just the fact, I mean, you know, people deciding that is the one is and is does matter. But I also saw like, I, I kind of did start to see, like, I call myself a bitcoin semi maximalist. By that I just simply mean that I believe bitcoin is the only one, only cryptocurrency that is a true financial asset. It's the only one that, that really can be considered like that. I do think there are some projects that are interesting, but I look at, like you just said, I look at more like a stock then because it's a company and the token represents like buying shares in that, in that company. And so yes, some will like, like any. And since it's a business, some will succeed potentially, some will fail, some will, will look like it will go way up in their stock price or their token price and then come crashing down. That's what happened to Dash. I mean, it literally was, I, I got in, it was like $4. It went all the way up to $1,500. Now it's down like 25 or something like that. So that's not, there's no scam there. It's just simply the business was. The business model didn't work. The market decided, no, that doesn't work. So I'm not saying somebody can't like getting like, you know, should. By the way, I should have made this kind of beginning. Nothing we say here is investment advice, whatever that thing you're supposed to say. This is just Devin and me, you know, spitballing, giving our opinions. So if you go and spend all your money because of what we say, you're an idiot. First of all, do your own research and decide what to do with your own money. [00:47:24] Speaker B: So that's the proper disclaimer, Eric. [00:47:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. So, but the thing is like all these other ones, if you want to invest in some small coin, hoping that it's going to take off, maybe it will and maybe you'll be smart enough to get out when it does. For me, it's just, it's funny. I was talking to my son about this. He's, he's only 21, but he's really into cryptocurrency and stuff too. And we just decide it's too exhausting. It's too exhausting to always have to follow, like, the latest on what's this one doing, what's that one doing? And I'm more proof of stake than you are, but I do think proof of work is the gold standard, so to speak. And I don't see how a project, though, will succeed on something with proof of work outside of Bitcoin, because proof of work is purposefully not that efficient from a software standpoint. You know, I mean, it's like just create an Oracle database, dude. Like, you don't need, you know, all this, like, proof of work. There's, there's, there's not a lot of use cases. In other words, now there is one huge use case and that's what Bitcoin is using it for, which is we have a, a scarcity when we need a scarcity. Typically in technology projects, you don't want scarcity, you want abundance. And so I'm not convinced. And I will say, like, I was a big Ethereum. We probably should have gotten Brantley on here so he can, you know, go pro Ethereum. I was big on Ethereum for a long time. I just don't know. I just, I don't see the use cases anymore like in Eric. [00:48:55] Speaker B: So I also was, I mean, I was huge Ethereum. I was like, Ethereum's the way because it was touted as the world computer. One brief thing for the programmers. With Ethereum, you can write a Turing Complete software program that can run on the Ethereum blockchain. With Bitcoin, you can't. It's a very limited. [00:49:13] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:14] Speaker B: Script. So from a computer programmer standpoint, Ethereum is way more interesting than Bitcoin. [00:49:19] Speaker A: Right. And I looked down on Bitcoin for years because of that. [00:49:21] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And Ethereum still looks down on it. It's like bitcoin is ossified. It's stuck in the past. That's actually a feature in my view. [00:49:29] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:30] Speaker B: But yeah, and maybe we could get Brantley on here. But one of the differences is, you know, when Satoshi launched Bitcoin, well, no one cared about it but him and eventually a few others. Hal Finney said, I'll try it out with you. Right. It was worth nothing. But then over Time people started joining it. And so it's as close to what I would call a fair launch project as it could get. [00:49:57] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:58] Speaker B: People found out about it, people started using it. And then the key thing was Satoshi who has about a million bitcoin, he disappeared and the million bitcoin has never moved. [00:50:10] Speaker A: I strongly believe that he's dead. Well in I really, I know no way to know. [00:50:14] Speaker B: You think that he's dead, huh? [00:50:17] Speaker A: Well. [00:50:20] Speaker B: But, but Ethereum and all these other projects, what do they do? They do what's called a pre mine, meaning they allocate a percentage of the tokens before they ever launched the project to the venture capitalists, to the founders. So Ethereum has its Vitalik Buterin it has its Joe Lubin. These other guys in it's come out, they weren't public with this, but it came out they had an enormous pre mine for Ethereum. I don't know what the percentage is. It's something big. Do you happen to know, Eric? [00:50:50] Speaker A: I don't, I don't. I do, I do know though that like, and just to be clear, I don't think a pre mine in of itself is immoral. As long as everything is transparent. As long as you're not lying about what people are getting. If you want to do a pre mine, it's just like a stock in a company people get. I was involved in a company, a startup in the one I was talking about, the web hosting company where I got stock in it for working there before and it never went public. But like I had the stock in it and if it had gone public, I get, I have founder shares and some of our first employees, our first like 20 some employees, we gave them all stock in it and I think that's fine, there's nothing immoral about that. But the problem is when people don't know that you need to know exactly how many there are of the token and who and basically what was distributed before it was open to the public. [00:51:39] Speaker B: And the fact that you and I don't know that for Ethereum, even though we were big in Ethereum. [00:51:44] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:51:45] Speaker B: Obviously they didn't want that to be public. And and so the reason this comes up is because Ethereum is the number two cryptocurrency, right. And has been for seven years or however long. So like it's a big deal. And I guess what I think about it with it is time will tell. Right? Time will tell. Right now, for the past two years, Ethereum's value compared to Bitcoin has plummeted yes. And that was after Bitcoin, sorry, Ethereum went to proof of stake and it was supposed to usher in this new era of Ethereum, Ethereum being awesome. Instead actually Ethereum's lost value. So I'm like, great, let's see what happens. Let's let the market decide which has the most value. [00:52:34] Speaker A: I've yet to see a crypto project that really has had a real world usage that really hits because a lot of, you know, the big promise is like we'll do smart contracts, we'll have contracts for like mortgages and you know, all this stuff. But the fact is that it just, it's not, there's not a use case for that ultimately people aren't really wanting that and there's so many difficulties with like integrating it with the real world in that situation. And all I've seen is like the major use case for these projects is just so you can defy like trade between them. Okay, I mean that's nice and maybe somebody makes some money on that. But that's not an actual, I mean that's all an internal, like you. For it to go big, it has to a use case outside of the digital world, outside of the crypto world, then it's going to be. And that's what Bitcoin does. It has a use case outside of the digital world. It actually lets you store value for a very long time and not lose the value. I want to. Okay, so, so our point is neither of us are really recommending go trade these other cryptos unless you're, you know, a degen who just wants to like have fun and like, you know, do your, do your trading and I mean, you know, whatever. Yeah, so let's get back to Bitcoin though. Now I want to talk about some of the objections that we hear in the Catholic world, particularly on it. Like there's been objections since the beginning. I mean we've heard them all and they recycle. I mean the funny thing is they're usually the same and some of them just have to do. I think the number one thing is I, I want to address and this is, I, I, I, I have empathy for this objection. I will say this is probably the one that I'm like, I get where you're coming from. You and I are tech geeks. We live in a kind of, we've lived in a digital world in a lot of ways, young people particularly, but a lot of people are like, you can't touch Bitcoin. You can't like, you know, hold it. You can't put it in your safe. You can't. Like, it doesn't really exist. It's not real. Because I think in. In our traditional Catholic world, we both would probably agree that there is a problem of our world becoming less real. Like, one reason we go to traditional Latin mass is because it's real. I mean, it's. You got the smells, the bells, this physical and spiritual combination. Bitcoin, though, is. It doesn't exist in the quote, unquote, real world is the argument. So how can we really put faith in it as something and it's just so ethereal? How would you address that from a Catholic standpoint as well? [00:55:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. And I. It's also, you'll hear it formulated as, unless I can stand in front of it with my gun and protect it. [00:55:14] Speaker A: Right. [00:55:14] Speaker B: It's not real. And, and there's. There's Catholics who say that. And I understand also, like you said, why they say that. But just like you can stand in front of your safe that has gold in it with a gun and protect that gold, you can stand in front of this little piece of paper that has your private key on it. That's your little bitcoin bank account. And either way, gold and bitcoin are what are called bearer assets, meaning they have no counterparty risk. They are itself money. If someone conks you over the head and they get past you and your gun and take your gold, they have your gold. Sorry, if they take your little sheet of paper with your private key, they've got your bitcoin. They took it so you can defend it. Now, a corollary is, yeah, but it's not real. It requires electricity and it requires the Internet network to be able to function. And I agree with that. It does require electricity and it requires some sort of networking well. But when we're hedging bets, if we get to the point in our society where we don't have electricity anymore because we bombed ourselves back to the stone age, you're right. Bitcoin is not the thing to worry about. Time to craft weapons out of, rediscover brass or whatever and attack each other with swords. [00:56:41] Speaker A: The thing is, everybody's bank account goes to zero then, too. That's the thing. We don't recognize how much of our assets are digital today. Because, like, I mean, if you have any money you have in the bank, it's not real. I mean, that's just. It's as real as bitcoin. It's less real than bitcoin. And so you lose all that. And even stuff. Even if you have some gold and stuff now you got to trade it, which means you could get stolen from you. I mean, there's just so many problems if the grid goes down. Bitcoin's not the solution. No, but there's a million and one other. Like, you know, people talk about bitcoin like it's a hedge for bad times. And it is. But there's a million and one more than that, bad times that don't include the grid going down. [00:57:28] Speaker B: It's a big spectrum here. A lot can happen along that spectrum. [00:57:32] Speaker A: Right. And like I said, once you. If we're a grid down scenario, we're not, you know, we're not caring about anything other than just survival. And almost everything you possess is worthless at that point. Point. [00:57:44] Speaker B: That's right. [00:57:45] Speaker A: Unless you can burn it for f. You know, for fuel and to keep you warm. [00:57:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And they figured out it's like if the grid went down for like a month or something, something like half the world's population. Half the world's population dies. Or half the idea America dies. So you've got. So that's. Yeah, that's an objection. And I get it that like, how to say this. I don't think there's going to be bitcoin in heaven. You know, the streets aren't paved with bitcoin. They're paid with gold. Like, yeah, granted this is a human construct, but so is the Federal Reserve note with the pyramid and the eye and all of the crazy stuff on our dollars. Right. It's like if you're willing to save in dollars, you should be able. In Federal reserve notes, you should be able to be willing to save in bitcoin. We are a digital society now and that's not bad. We want to make sure we have real touch points with real people and real person and go to mass and you have to have auricular confession. It can't be virtually. I mean, yes, it's. It's very sacramental, our Catholic faith, but that doesn't preclude us using bitcoin. [00:58:51] Speaker A: Right, right. Another thing I've heard is that, you know, some of the. One of the complaints is just the idea that somehow it's immoral that people have gotten richer from simply buying this digital asset and doing nothing. Like literally the work it takes to buy a little bit of bitcoin, it takes what, 10 minutes to set up your coinbase account or wherever and buy some bitcoin and then all Of a sudden, your $100 you spent is worth 300 in a couple years. There's definitely a segment of particularly traditional Catholics who would say that's immoral in of itself because you did no work for that money. What is your argument? Kind of against that? [00:59:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a real Catholic teaching here that I'm sure is from Aquinas with regard to the meaning of the word speculation. And that speculation is immoral. And I got into a big discussion with this, with another Catholic who's a financial advisor named Andy Flattery. And he's on. [00:59:55] Speaker A: He's on. Yeah, he's been on our. He's been on the podcast before. Andy. Great. [00:59:59] Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah. I now call him the Gentleman Speculator, because that's the name of his podcast. Yeah, he put speculator in the title. So, you know. But one, this is not speculation. Two, I'm not buying bitcoin in order to get rich. That might end up happening. All I'm doing just as if I bought gold or I bought that acre of land or bought that cow. I'm hoping to preserve purchasing power. Right. Knowing that the government is going to steal from me. They're very open about it. We're going to steal from you. It's just a question of how much. Our goal is to steal from you. 2% per year, but it might be 10% in reality, or 20%. Okay, thank you for letting me know you're going to steal from me. I'm going to try to not let you do that. And there's legal ways they let you right now try to not let the people do that. So I'm going to buy a scarce asset, Bitcoin. If they devalue the dollar so much that. That bitcoin goes up in nominal terms of dollar. Well, okay, that's. That's not my fault that they tried to steal from me. And I. And I have a little thing that whatever they try to steal from me, it like, does the opposite. It sounds like, in fact, we've done something smart. And if we were rewarded for doing something smart, well, great. [01:01:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's what I. That is my argument, too, because I'm like, do you think it's immoral for somebody to buy an ounce of gold and hold onto it? And if that value goes up, is that somehow immoral? Now, what if it went down? I mean, one thing I told my economics class last week was that an ounce of gold 2,000 years ago could buy you a nice toga. An ounce of gold today can buy you A nice suit. And it's like it's retained its purchasing power over time. But like gold, for example, I remember the first time I bought announced a goal was like 20 years ago. It was like $300. It's now about 2,600. Did I do something immoral? There's literally no difference, morality wise in the action of buying an ounce of gold and buying like 0.01 Bitcoin 10 years ago. And it's gone up. And so the point is that it's not a matter because it's like same with buying land now. You might work the land, but you might just buy the land and not work it. You're just buying it because you're like, okay, I feel confident that in 10 years my purchasing power from this land can be worth about what it is now, maybe a little bit more now. Of course, the reason I think it goes, people talk about bitcoin differently is because of course it has such dramatic volatility, such dramatic price rises, price gain, losses. And that's, I think that's simply a factor of it being new. [01:02:41] Speaker B: Yes. [01:02:41] Speaker A: And you have a small market that starts off, I mean, literally it was just satoshi at first, then Hal Finney, then a few got the OGs, Roger Vers and people like that getting involved early on. But now it's growing bigger and bigger and bigger. And so the volatility I think over time will decrease. And so yes, it is true that you could buy some Bitcoin at $1,000 and it goes up to $10,000 within a week or two. I mean, that's literally stuff like that has happened. And so is it because it's a lot that somehow that made it immoral? No, it's just a matter of I just think this is going to retain my purchasing power over time. And in fact, part of the reason bitcoin has gone up, not the only reason, but part of the reason is because simply the value of the dollar has gone down. I mean, just like gold has gone up for the same reason. [01:03:34] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah, gold's gone up too. It's just gone up less. [01:03:38] Speaker A: Right. [01:03:39] Speaker B: And bitcoin is a free market. It's Global and it's 24 7. And the financial wizards have not yet gotten in place all their little tricks and contraptions and derivatives to control and manipulate it. Right. And they do have those things in place for different asset classes. So that might happen. You know, bitcoin will even out over time. But I think people get a little bit of sour grapes because they, they like didn't get in on it. They don't quite understand it. And so it's easier to say than, well, it must be a scam or it must be immoral. And I'm going to have a moral high ground by saying, oh, look, I'm, you know, you're buying it. And I, you know, and then they see how much it goes up and they're like, oh, well, you know, there's a cognitive dissonance and a human nature to just want to dump on somebody. [01:04:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I want. We're going long here, but I hope you don't mind. Can you, can you stick around for a little bit longer, Eric? [01:04:33] Speaker B: We could talk about this topic for the next three hours and we have a lot to talk about. [01:04:37] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. But I, I do want to cover some more stuff. When I get geeked out, it just, you just keep going. But I want a couple more objections I want to talk about. One is, I've seen people say, Catholics, non Catholics, that they still believe it's hackable. Now we're both, you know, I, I haven't programmed a long time, but you still are involved in that world. Is Bitcoin hackable? [01:05:04] Speaker B: The short answer is no. The longer answer is there could be a bug currently that's not been found, or a bug could be introduced with a change in the code that could allow an exploit to happen of some magnitude. So it's a possibility. And then in the future, if they ever come out with quantum computers of any reality and size, not only would bitcoin be hackable, but every single digital system from your bank account to the website would also be hackable. But like you said, it's open source. There's trillions of dollars behind it. So the incentive to hack it if there was an exploit is very high. You know, if North Korean and Russians are allegedly going after things that are worth a million or $10 million, 3 trillion would be a nice honey pot for them. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Right. I think one thing people who aren't programmers don't understand is that when you have code, your code solidifies over time. The more it's used, the more people are, are accessing particularly open source code where everybody can see it, everybody's looking at it. And to me, what I would say is like, the hackability of bitcoin literally goes down every day. And it's gotten to a point now where it's practically impossible. I'm not saying it's theoretically impossible. I'm just saying that the fact is there's so many People who have looked at the code, so many people who've tried to hack it. I'd also say there's incentive structures though to prevent certain types of hacks in the sense of like a mining attack or something like that. Because you literally devalue what you're stealing. If you steal it. If all of a sudden it came out that there was a mining company that grew so big and they figured out a way to manipulate the blockchain, manipulate you know how it was happening. As soon as that happened the value of bitcoin would just plummet and therefore what they did was, would literally be worth nothing. So they don't even have an incentive to do it. Their incentive is actually to keep, to be honest. I mean not because they're like, don't have the fall, I mean they have the original sin as much as the rest of us, but they're actually incentivized. So you have these two factors that you have code that everybody has seen for 15 years now and people were incentivized to try to hack, maybe grab a few bitcoin here and there. But you also have an incentive structure where any, any attempt at a major hack like from a government agency to take over mining companies like that actually ends up would devalue it as well. And I think, and people understand how many people see this stuff. I mean just there's so many people who are aware of the bitcoin code and like, and you mentioned earlier bitcoin being ossified, that is a feature. Because any change to the code, if it's anything other than the most minute tiny change, there is a huge fight and debate over it. And it's likely it won't happen. I won't get into the block size wars from years ago, but. [01:08:12] Speaker B: Or the ordinals war now. [01:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Or yeah. Ordinary. Yeah. But the point is, is that that's a good thing because you don't want your money to be changed. You don't. If all of a sudden somebody said I'm going to change the properties of gold, we'd all freak out. If like there was some way they, if alchemy was really true and you could like change the properties of gold, we'd all be like, you know, like let's say they said gold, the boiling point of gold, we can change that. Well that I would be like, I'd be worried about my, the value of my goal because I don't know what that's going to do to it. I might think all that might not have any Impact, it might have a huge impact. I don't know. And so the same thing with Bitcoin. People will not allow. And that's what people might understand in a project like this, there's nobody in charge. [01:08:54] Speaker B: That's right. [01:08:55] Speaker A: And that's, that's a good thing. So, and in fact all of us are in charge. [01:08:58] Speaker B: That's right. [01:08:59] Speaker A: So, so then if, if some, if the people who are involved with actually changing the code, they're like, hey, they get a little arrogant like we're gonna do this and all of a sudden everybody's like, no, we're not going to do that. [01:09:09] Speaker B: And because the majority of the 10 thousands of miners and people running nodes have to accept the software change and say, I'm going to run that on my node. I have to run it on my, I have a little minor. [01:09:23] Speaker A: Yep. [01:09:23] Speaker B: In a little solo lottery minor. We won't go into details, but if I don't want to run it, I won't run it. And that's that decentralized resistance that it has. Yeah. And you're right, Eric, there is the, the theoretical 51% attack where a government got control 51% of the mining power. They could choose which block was next on the blockchain, even if it broke the rules. And they could make it where they took people's money, but they would event instantly destroy. They would waste a lot of money doing so and they would destroy their own value, which, which, so it's great because Bitcoin aligns all these incentives where even when people are acting in a self interest, not in a negative way, just in the self interest, the miners, the node runners, the people using it, it benefits the system and makes it stronger. [01:10:19] Speaker A: Right, right. And I think that's, that's important. We're not claiming perfection here, but I, I am claiming that it's incredibly strong, incredibly resistant to any type of technological problems. [01:10:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, and Eric, I hate to interrupt again, but this, not to dump on Ethereum, but this is the thing with Ethereum. Ethereum doesn't have a hard cap of 21 million. They don't have a hard cap, period. They make major changes to their system based on the committee that decides they want to do stuff. [01:10:50] Speaker A: Right. [01:10:51] Speaker B: And they roll it out. It's. And you don't know what's going to happen in a year. [01:10:55] Speaker A: Right. Which might be fine for a software project, but that's not money. [01:10:58] Speaker B: That's right. [01:10:59] Speaker A: It's just, it's not, it's not hard. [01:11:01] Speaker B: Money, it's not ultrasound money. Eric. [01:11:06] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Yeah. It's not sound money. It's just a fiat system, which, you know, fiat systems work for certain things. I mean, you know, so that's, you know. But let's be clear about what it is and what it isn't. The last objection I want to talk about was I've seen Catholics, some Catholics who are maybe more into conspiracies than others, talk about like, it's. It's a one world government type of currency. Because the fact is, bitcoin does strive to be a global currency in the sense that everybody in the world could be using it and the whole world could be on this bitcoin standard. And like, I think I understand why people are concerned about a potential one world government. Like, you know, un. All this, the globalist, Klaus Schwab, all that stuff. I'm not. I don't discount that as real dangers. [01:11:47] Speaker B: No, I don't either. [01:11:48] Speaker A: But why is bitcoin not the. Not part of those dangers? [01:11:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And by the way, I'm laughing just because in my book, Eric, I've got a bunch of conspiracy stuff and some of it ends up becoming true. So I'm about, as a conspiracy theorist, as the next guy. And the funny thing is, though, that ironically, bitcoin is the opposite. So in other words, bitcoin, because no one can stop me from using it. It's exactly what the globalist, totalitarian people don't want you to have. They don't want us to have our own money. Having our own money that we can control is the very last thing that they want, which is why the thing that they want is the central bank digital currency, which is the doppelganger evil twin of bitcoin coin that you don't control. They control it. They control what you can spend your money on and. And whether you can spend it and how many tokens you get each month. So it's. It's the polar opposite. Now, a lot of. Some of my friends have said to me, who are Catholic, but we don't know who Satoshi was. Therefore, of course, it was the CIA. [01:12:58] Speaker A: Right. I've heard that from many people. [01:13:00] Speaker B: Right in. Yeah, the first. The first argument is, well, even if that's the case, the code's open source, and so it doesn't matter. [01:13:09] Speaker A: They shot themselves in the foot. [01:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Which they wouldn't have done. [01:13:13] Speaker A: 2. [01:13:13] Speaker B: I'd say, like, when you look at Satoshi's emails, they read like it was a real person. [01:13:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:13:19] Speaker B: You know what I mean? And now those emails were released, like, all These other emails, you could see those forum posts before and whatnot. But it seems like he was a real person or is a real person. So the, you know, it's right to be afraid of these globalists and these totalitarians. They're, they're bad people and they want to control you. And you see them all the time. They're trying to, you know, not let farmers inherit land and. Right. Like that's what they're doing. But Bitcoin, even though it's digital, just like a central bank digital currency, they're the exact opposite things. [01:13:56] Speaker A: Right? [01:13:56] Speaker B: What do you think, Eric? [01:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's what I wanted to bring up with the central bank digital currencies. It's like, you know, it's like I just, this is a terrible analogy, but like a knife, I can use it to cut butter for my bread, or I can use it to cut your heart out. And so a digital currency, depending on how it's used, how it's set up, it can be used different ways. A central bank digital currency is extremely scary and dangerous because it would be a central bank literally being able to control your money at a very finite level. They could say, you know, you, you go to the gun store, you buy, yeah, I want to buy this gun. And they see that and they flag it. Nope. And, and you're, and your, your money just doesn't work there. They could, they could do things. These are all, by the way, the things I'm saying examples are actually real world cases that they've said as a positive thing. They could also, for example, say you get your paycheck in central bank digital currency. You get your thousand dollar paycheck, you have to spend it within three months. Because this whole Keynesian idea like spending juicy economy, so you literally have to spend. So it's like what we were talking about earlier about we're incentivized to spend. This would be like, no, you're forced to spend. Well, a decentralized digital currency like Bitcoin and Bitcoin really being the only one that matters. No, nobody controls it. And so nobody tells you how to spend it. They cannot. They cannot. I mean, I could send you Bitcoin right now and there's literally nobody in the world that could stop me from doing it, no matter what, if I know how to. I mean, there's certain aspects of this, like, you gotta know what you're doing. Like if you're using an exchange like Coinbase, I could send you money through Bitcoin, through Coinbase. Your coinbase account and that all is fine. I'm not against that. But that there is a level of control, that they're like a bank, you should realize it. But I could, I know ways and you know ways to receive that. We could send it. Nobody could stop it. That's exactly why the globalists hate bitcoin. Yes, they, they, they, they. The one world government people. Bitcoin is, is literally probably one of the chief enemies of one world government. And so that, that, so it's, it's when people say that I, I try to keep a straight face, but I almost have to chuckle because it's like literally the opposite. And I understand, because you don't understand. [01:16:10] Speaker B: Right. [01:16:11] Speaker A: People don't understand how the technology. And I get that. [01:16:13] Speaker B: They do. And you, Eric, you posted, you know, the most mild post on X a few weeks ago that was like, hey, Catholics, check out bitcoin. And immediately there are people, well meaning Catholics who don't understand, who are leveling these objections. [01:16:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so I want to like finish up here with a little discussion of. With Trump being elected, there's huge excitement in the bitcoin world because Trump came out very pro bitcoin during his campaign. He made some promises about things and a lot of the people who surround him are very pro bitcoin. The guy who just was appointed the Secretary of commerce, like, literally owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. And RFK is a big bitcoin guy. Vivek is a big bitcoin guy. All these guys around him are very much into this. People are thinking this is going to be good for bitcoin in a lot of ways. But what I want to just ask you about is the bitcoin, the strategic bitcoin reserve. This is a bill. It's been introduced by Senator Lomas. Is it Lummis? I think it's Lummis. Of Wyoming? Yes, of Wyoming. And the idea is to create a strategic bitcoin reserve. And there's a real. I mean, Polymarket says, I think there's a 38% chance this is going to happen. And Poly Market, they know what they're talking about. But the idea. So why don't you explain what that is and whether or not that's a good or bad thing for our country and for bitcoin. [01:17:36] Speaker B: Oh, man. Yeah. So a strategic bitcoin reserve, you know, we have a strategic oil reserve, which Biden spent down to almost nothing, by the way, to, to keep prices low for political reasons. Leaving that aside, allegedly we still have gold Stored as a gold Knox, baby. [01:17:56] Speaker A: It's all there, right? [01:17:58] Speaker B: Whether that's still there or not is a conspiracy. That could be true. I don't know. They haven't let me go look at it, but. [01:18:04] Speaker A: Or anybody else go let Rand Paul look at it. That's what I want. [01:18:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So a strategic bitcoin reserve would be similar where the US would simply buy bitcoin up to a million, let's say, under the plan that I had seen over the next few years. And then all of a sudden we start to have something that's backing our money supply. We start to have something that could eventually be used to retire some of our debt. Imagine that. We. In other words, it actually could be the beginning of returning our country to a sound money standard. Which is, which is crazy because if, without this, the idea that we're ever paying off our debt. We're never paying off our debt. [01:18:52] Speaker A: Nope. [01:18:52] Speaker B: Never. Forget it. [01:18:53] Speaker A: And the goal is never shrinking our debt. [01:18:55] Speaker B: No, we're never shrinking it. And the goal, when you, when you understand this better, it becomes apparent their goal has never been to pay off the debt. [01:19:05] Speaker A: Right. [01:19:07] Speaker B: Now, would it be good for our country long term if we did this? Yes, it would. Would it be good for all the people in our country if we did this? Yes, it would. Would it be good for the people who want to go to war whenever they want and get us in. Involved in wars? No, because long term what this would cause would be a constraint. [01:19:33] Speaker A: Right? [01:19:33] Speaker B: Right. Upon them, just like gold used to be. A, A constraint. They don't want a constraint. Or there's. There's people who don't want the constraint. Which is why I wonder if this will ultimately go through because there's very powerful people who this is anathema to. [01:19:54] Speaker A: Right. [01:19:55] Speaker B: So what do you think, Eric? [01:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I have similar thoughts. I think a couple things. I think, I think it's a great idea. I hope they do it. Not because that'll make the price go up. It will make the price go up. But that's not the reason. But because to me, I look at it like this. Like you have the US government up here and bitcoin's this little, you know, bunch of, you know, for a long time, bunch of libertarians and anarchists and programmers who are kind of like this little project they were doing for Internet magic money. And you have the all powerful US government that just controls the world. I mean, we're the American empire. And I feel like if the US government established a strategic bitcoin reserve, it's almost like flipping it because now all of a sudden, the US Government's beholden to bitcoin rather than the other way around. I mean, the government beholden. Bitcoin's never been beholden the government, really, but in the sense of, like, who's got the power here? It's like bitcoin and a decentralized network that nobody owns all of a sudden has a lot of power. And I think that's a very good thing. But I agree with you that powerful people will know that. And so, I mean, the fact is, is that bitcoin is the peace currency. Because if you had a country that was truly on a bitcoin standard, they couldn't print, you know, they couldn't just, you know, generate and print a bunch of money for their wars. But I. I think. I think I still think it's got a decent chance to go through because ultimately it would coexist with our fiat money printing system. [01:21:26] Speaker B: Right. [01:21:27] Speaker A: So it's not like they could. They would have to stop printing money. But I do think over time, it would start to. There'd be this movement towards, like, okay, a sound money system, which is. Which is the ideal, which is what we want. You know, I think it'd be a good first step towards that. [01:21:44] Speaker B: Well, right. And as a first step, did you read A Creature from Jekyll island by G. Edward Griffin? [01:21:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. [01:21:51] Speaker B: So at the end of that book, which, by the way, that's a great book. Everyone should. Should read it. That's reading advice. I'm a reading advisor. He says, what on earth are we to do? And he, in this book, preceded bitcoin by decades. But he said, basically, here's the steps in order to get back on sound money and how we would have to phase it in. And he used gold and silver because that was all there was. So I'm hearing a similarity of what you're saying. It could be the first step that phases in something that ultimately works. [01:22:22] Speaker A: It almost like sneaks it in. I think center alumnus Lummis knows this, but she's not going to say this part of it, but it's like it kind of sneaks it in, in the sense. Okay, now we've kind of established bitcoin as, like, you know, a true asset that we're kind of judging our other assets on, like, we're judging our fiat system on. And there's not talk about it would help pay down the debt. I don't quite understand that in a sense, like, are you selling it then? But I mean, the whole point is to not sell. We don't want it to be like the oil reserve where like you just spin it all and then you just go back where you were in Sierra. [01:22:55] Speaker B: This is a problem because some people, actually, most people don't know this, but we know this. The US Government has bitcoin because they've seized it from people. [01:23:03] Speaker A: Like 200,000? [01:23:04] Speaker B: Yeah, like 200,000 Bitcoin, which is a significant portion of the network of total amount. And they've seized it from people. Well, the Biden government started moving some of it around tens of thousands. And the idea was maybe they were gonna, they were gonna be selling some of it. And we're pretty sure that Germany sold all the bitcoin that they had seized from their people. So these governments are so stupid that they're like, you know, they're selling bitcoin for dollars that they can print. But one of the issues would be then, well, yeah, the Trump administration or whatever is favorable to bitcoin. But what happens if, if other people come in in four years and then they can just sell it, right, and they can just sell all of it and waste it. It only takes one irresponsible ne'er do well son to blow the inheritance and to come back as the prodigal. [01:23:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I would hope that. I haven't read the bill, but I would hope you would like, put in some. I know the government never has any constraints, but you at least make it more difficult for them to spend it. You know, like, yes, we're going to buy this. And I, I want to say, like, I do have a moral problem with them using that 200000 as like the, the beginning of the strategy strategic reserve, because they've talked about that. Because they, they, they seized it from people and they stole it. In other words, that's our nice word for stealing. Now it might be a situation where we can't do anything about that. So it's just, it's a done deal. And so if you're gonna do, if you're either gonna sell it or keep it in the reserve. Okay, fine. You know, I, it's not going back to the rightful owner either way. So. [01:24:41] Speaker B: But Eric, it would be a good use of some kind of time lock. You know, it's like. [01:24:45] Speaker A: Right, yes. [01:24:46] Speaker B: You buy the bitcoin, we're putting it into a multi sig signature. It's going to be time locked for like 20 years. No one can touch it. [01:24:55] Speaker A: Right, yeah, yeah, that, I mean, that, that would be great. I don't think they'd ever do that, but, you know, that would, that would be fun. Now. Okay, we're going to finish up here in a minute. But I, I already said once, I'll say it again. We're not giving investment advice here. Do whatever you want with your money. We don't care. Don't. Don't be immoral with it. That's the only thing we do, you know, don't do that. What would you suggest to somebody, though, who said, you know, I, I'm not, I don't know anything about bitcoin, but I, I am interested in maybe getting started, maybe putting a little bit in. I always tell people, never put anything in that you notice that you aren't willing to lose. I mean, you're not. Don't put in your kids, like, you know, food money in for this or something like that. But how I want to see, I want to hear how you start people off. Because I know what I say, but what do you. How do you start people off? [01:25:42] Speaker B: Okay, we're going to do this by generation. So, Eric. Yeah, for boomer generation, I say bitcoin now has these ETFs, Exchange Traded Funds, IBIT, NET, BTC. If you've got a stock account or have a retirement account, buy some of the bitcoin that way. Now, you and I know it's not real bitcoin. It's an etf. [01:26:05] Speaker A: Right. [01:26:06] Speaker B: Even doing that is a big jump for most boomers from what I found. [01:26:10] Speaker A: Yes. But it's something they know how to do. They know how to call up their broker or just go onto their online account and say, yeah, I'm going to put $1,000 into this ETF. Because just for people understand what ETF is, it essentially trades exactly like a stock for all practical purposes, but it tracks the price of bitcoin. Because if you buy a certain $100 ETF, the ETF manager has to get $100 worth of Bitcoin to back it. [01:26:36] Speaker B: So that's right. And then, you know, for Gen Xers who are the coolest generation, like me and you, well, you know, now it's like, okay, yes, we can understand how to buy Bitcoin. And usually when the price goes up like this, and I've started getting messages from friends and my normie friend saying, oh, this bitcoin looks interesting. What should I do? That's when I say, open up a Coinbase account, which is just like a bank account. Put some money into it, put 100 bucks into it, 50 bucks 30 bucks, right. And buy some. If you want to get fancier, go with Swan or River or Strike or one of these other apps that's more bitcoin only, but that's even another level. And if you want to get serious, yeah, look at what you got and put in 1% of your portfolio. [01:27:26] Speaker A: Right. [01:27:28] Speaker B: And just start watching the price and watch the news and I'll invite you into my, you know, signal group of local bitcoin dads and we'll go from there. So what about you, Eric? Do you have any tips? [01:27:42] Speaker A: I typically, you know, the ETS are relatively new, but I agree. So I haven't recommend those a lot, but I would. That's, that's exactly what I say for people who are probably boomers or just very, you know, very much in that world and they're not going to be tech world. Coinbase is always my go to because it's the most user friendly, it's the most established. It's a public company now. It's been around for 13, 14 years. I've had an account with them for though. I mean, my first bitcoin I ever bought was at Coinbase in 2013. So I as well. Yeah. Now, here's the thing. We acknowledge that the beauty of bitcoin is that it is free. It is not free to buy, but, you know, freedom free it is and you're able to have total control over it that nobody else can take it from you. But that's not true when you buy it, when you hold it at Coinbase or an ETF especially, you're not even, you're not even yourself. But basically what you're, you do have a level of trust in Coinbase. If Coinbase goes under, if they're doing shenanigans behind the scenes, you could lose your bitcoin. And I always tell people that. But I'd also say the same thing's true about your local bank, same thing's true about a lot of things. So it's like the risk level is no different there. And then when somebody is like a tech person, they really are into it, then that's when we start talking about hardware, wallets, actually holding your own bitcoin that you control and that it, you know. Now here's the thing, there's a risk in that though. There's always a risk. You screw up and you lose, you can literally lose everything if you, if you lose your, your seed phrase or something like that and you, in your, in your, in your hardware device gets in, gets damaged or something. Like that if you just screw up and how you send it, you could send all of your bit bitcoin into the ether and it goes away forever. Yeah. I mean I don't know about you, but every single time I do a cryptocurrency Transaction I do 15 checks. Like before I hit send, I'm always checking. Okay, is the address. I mean it's not super user friendly when you get deep in Coinbase is very user friendly. It's no different than using a bank. If you use Coinbase you'll be fine. As far as, don't be intimidated. I do think that what I tell people starting off is that just go Coinbase, you know, depending on, you know, get $100 worth or if that's too much, $30 worth or if you, if you're well off, 500 worth, whatever. And then just kind of watch. Because usually what happens is you always get the same thing happens often they're buying it when there's a pump going on and so it does go up. All of a sudden their hundred dollars becomes 150, like wow, in like a week and like holy cow. Then a year later it's $70 or something like that and they're like, oh crap. Some of them then sell but then all of a sudden a couple years later it's 200, 300, $400. And I always tell people this, like if you bought bitcoin in the history of bitcoin, it always will be worth more five years later. That has been true by the better thing because that's the cycle. But I always say five years. Yeah, it always in every single case. And I don't think that's going to stop. I, it won't be up as much, but I do think it's going to. I personally think again, not investment advice, but I do think there's a decent chance you could lose 80% of your value on paper. Now it doesn't matter if you don't sell. I mean what was it? It was 60 something thousand. 64, 69. I think 69,000 went down to 16,000. [01:31:23] Speaker B: That's correct. [01:31:24] Speaker A: Imagine in a two year time frame, this is just recently. So imagine you bought $100 worth of 69. I don't know, I'm not going to do the math in top of my head, but when it's down to 16,000, the hundred dollars is now what, 30 something. So it's a lot. And so that hurts to see when you open up your app. So don't open up your app. [01:31:46] Speaker B: That's right. [01:31:47] Speaker A: You know, the idea is whatever you put in, you need to have a long time frame. You need to be thinking, I'm not going to touch this for anything. But the absolute most emergency emergencies for at least five years. And I think I'm not one of these people who think you just hold it forever and never. I mean, nope, use it. Life isn't about that. Life isn't about like accumulating assets. Life is about living. And so my, my all thought is always that I know, I know kind of where it ranks on. It will be the last thing I spend. Yeah, I'll spend other assets first. [01:32:23] Speaker B: Yes. [01:32:23] Speaker A: And also it will only be like there might be assets that aren't true necessities I use it for. But I've got that planned in advance. I tell them, okay, if it gets to this price, I'll sell a little bit off to do because you know, the WI Fi has always wanted to go to vacation, whatever. [01:32:38] Speaker B: It was actually this. But with my wife, same thing was like, yeah, I had an agreement with my wife that I would sell some. And by the way, I gave $5 to a friend however many years ago, forgot about it for coffee, to pay him for coffee. And he messaged me the day and was like, you know that bitcoin you gave me? It's worth 35 now. [01:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I have sent bitcoin to so many people and I, and I stopped doing it because one reason is I noticed that nobody, they almost all lost it because like, you know, they just didn't know how to. And I realized the better thing to do is just educate them, let them buy it and things like that. But yeah, and it's funny though, a few who do, like there's a exchange student who lived with my sister and he was, he was from Italy and he was into bitcoin. And I just for fun, this is like 2015 or something. I sent him like you know, 100 worth or 50 or something like that worth of bitcoin just because we were hanging out. I was like, oh yeah, he had a wallet. I was like, I'll send you something, you know, just for fun. That's worth a lot of money now because I think bitcoin is about 500 in or something like that. So it's probably worth like thousands of dollars now, which is great. I mean, I don't mind, you know, it's not like, you know, yeah, that's a 200X. Yeah, yeah. And I know he kept it because I saw him actually he came Back to the country for my niece's wedding. And he kept most of it. So yeah, I was like, good for you. [01:33:54] Speaker B: So, yeah, you're his Italian godfather now. You're his American godfather. [01:33:59] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. So, okay, so the last thing I do want to mention is your book Chasing the Seeds. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it? Because if people have been listening to us for this long, they got them now end up being buyers of this book. [01:34:15] Speaker B: These are the true believers. And it's on Kindle for 99 cents and the paperback's $13. So this is a fiction series. Ages 14 and older can read it. So 14 through adult. And it is realistic fiction. So it's like real world. There's no one has magical powers. You know, we're shooting stuff out of their hands or something. And it tracks a 20 something year old computer programmer from Austin who discovers a clue or riddle in his deceased father's bookshelf. A book. And it puts him on a scavenger hunt across the world to try to find out who his father really was. The character's best friend is Catholic. He meets a young woman on the way who's Catholic and he's being chased by a rogue FBI agent. So there's your conspiracy theory. That's not really even a conspiracy anymore. [01:35:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:11] Speaker B: And so the goal of the book is there's some stuff with bitcoin in the book. There's Catholic stuff in the book. The main character is an atheist. But this is going to be a series. Matter of fact, I just sent the second book to my editor who's going to start editing it now. It'll probably be a five or six book series. As the books go along, it will get more and more captured Catholic. [01:35:36] Speaker A: Right. [01:35:37] Speaker B: But not in a way that's hitting you over the head. [01:35:40] Speaker A: Right. [01:35:41] Speaker B: More in the organic way that someone could become Catholic. [01:35:45] Speaker A: Right. [01:35:46] Speaker B: And what could happen to society? You know, there's these dystopian fiction books and everyone, you know, that kind of thing out there think about this as Catholic dystopian fiction. [01:35:56] Speaker A: Right. [01:35:57] Speaker B: It will become that as the series goes on. And I wanted something for my son to read who's a teen and adults who would enjoy it. I thought about actually giving him this, this Homestead series. Angel Studios coming up, this movie, Homestead. But the books, from what I can tell, it's post apocalyptic, which I like. Survivalist, and it's Christian. But I look more into it and it's more Protestant. Mormon, Right? [01:36:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:24] Speaker B: And I'm. And it's got A bunch of profanity. So this book, my series, will have zero profanity, zero blasphemy, zero sexual stuff. Stuff. [01:36:32] Speaker A: Right. [01:36:32] Speaker B: It's clean. And Eric Sammons read it and he did not think he was going to like it. [01:36:38] Speaker A: I mean, here's the thing. Okay. I'm gonna. I did read it and I gave you a review on Amazon. I. My biggest concern, when I hear like Catholic people writing fiction books is, okay, this is going to be like those terrible Protestant Christian movies that are, that are about the message, not about a story. And they're just preaching the whole time and they're cringe worthy. And when you told me about the book and I was like. And you sent me a copy, I believe. Yeah. And I. And I was like. And I didn't even pick it up for a little while because I was nervous. I'm like, I like Devin, he's a good guy. I don't want to have to hate his book. And so I was nervous. I. I'll be the first to admit it, but it was good. I liked it because it doesn't do that. It has the Catholic stuff in there. I mean, you being a former atheist, it helps you to understand the atheist. You can make the atheist realistic. It's not like hitting you overhead. I also was chuckling because being involved in the bitcoin world for so long, there's a lot of non believers, let's just say in it, a lot of people who are not Catholic, not Christian or anything like that. And so if they are reading it, I think it's great because it, you know, it's going to, I mean, and the funny thing you didn't do a lot in the first book, which I think is on purpose. Right. Because like, you know, you're just kind of saying, these are Catholic people. Whatever. I mean, it's almost like, it was like, almost like an aside. Like they just happened to be Catholic. Yes. But like, as a Catholic, I read. I'm like, oh, I see. I. I did see where some things were going a little bit. [01:38:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:38:12] Speaker A: But I think a. Not somebody who's not Catholic might not quite pick all that up like I would. [01:38:17] Speaker B: It needs to bait them in. Eric, this first book is the bait for non Catholics. [01:38:21] Speaker A: Right. [01:38:22] Speaker B: And is the same. [01:38:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And there. And also there's a huge twist at the end, near the end. So. Which I actually was a little surprised by. So. [01:38:30] Speaker B: And that's impressive, Eric, because I thought that you actually would probably pick up on some of these things I picked up on. [01:38:35] Speaker A: I picked on some of them. But I didn't think you go where you went. That's. [01:38:39] Speaker B: That's. [01:38:39] Speaker A: That was the surprise. And you went there. [01:38:41] Speaker B: So we're going all the way with this, Eric. [01:38:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Exactly. You did. So anyway, I recommend it. I'll put a link. Where's the best place for people to buy at Amazon? [01:38:49] Speaker B: Amazon. You know, as much as I don't like Amazon, like the next ex Catholic. Yep, it's on Amazon. [01:38:54] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. So I'll put a link to it there. Yeah, it's a good book. I mean, it's just. It's enjoyable reading. It's not like, you know, it's not super long. I mean, this one. And so, yeah, it's just something enjoyable to read. And like you said, teenagers I think, would enjoy it as well. In fact, I. I should get my 15 year old to read it. I think she. She might like it. [01:39:12] Speaker B: Yeah, Brantley Milligan's teen son read it. So you need to get yours and see whether they like. [01:39:18] Speaker A: That's right. Exactly. So did Brantley son like it? Do you know? [01:39:21] Speaker B: Yes. Positive review. [01:39:23] Speaker A: Okay. [01:39:24] Speaker B: I don't think he wrote a review on Amazon, but you know, Brantley being Ethereum guy, I'm like, okay, it's fine. [01:39:31] Speaker A: Oh, I hope Brantley watches this because we talked about him a lot. So. [01:39:34] Speaker B: Yeah, we can tag him on X with it. [01:39:36] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly. So, okay, well, let's wrap it up here. Thank you for spending so much time on this. I hope this was helpful to people who are just kind of Catholics, particularly who are interested in bitcoin, hear about it and want. Want kind of the real information about it. So I appreciate you taking the time to do this. [01:39:53] Speaker B: It was awesome, Eric. [01:39:54] Speaker A: Okay, until next time, everybody. Got everybody. God love.