Joe Rogan Experience #446 — Andreas Antonopoulos Transcript

Transcript

0:00 So I love the fact that you can get on the internet and you have a conversation on Twitter I mean, the internet is fucking beautiful. would have went it's not that it's this well stop what are you saying look right here here's and you stick it on the edge of the network, All it sees is bytes and it just get online with. That starts becoming real. Well, Tiger Direct can very simply take that Bitcoin

3:43 Cash on the internet And I say cash because Great. Now the whole network knows it, so that means Joe has a tenth of a Bitcoin. because of the rise of the popularity of Bitcoin. the rise of Bitcoin is instead of just addressing all these financial concerns and all these It means direct from one individual And that this other system is our norm, our standard,

6:10 Money has existed for tens of thousands of years, And so you acquire certain notions of what money is and how it works. they start asking questions about money. And it quickly becomes apparent to all of us when we do this that we don't know much about money. Well, that's a whole other question. I mean, the real issue is this. value it absolutely has value.

8:40 because the rates at which you can produce gold is fixed and it's hoarded and you have And the idea is that you provide a sound basis for money, 21 quadrillion coins, plenty of coins. Jesus Christ, why is that so complicated? The point is, what value does it have? 800-something today. So a computer would cost you about 1,200 millibits. And today's dollar is worth the same as, you know, 13 cents at the beginning of the previous century.

12:15 that are not necessarily based on a lack of technology, They can't buy things online. incredibly corrupt system and fucked up economy. will you take Bitcoin? And guess what? Some of them said, never heard of it. And some of them you know, a street seller who is, you know, selling vegetables How many months? And now I can do it again with Bitcoin. And that's one of the easiest ways to get Bitcoin, by the way, is find someone who wants to pay for something with Bitcoin. Wow. And so they're not ready to yet, but you think that

15:54 Whoa. your phone. It's not sitting in a bank somewhere. in a drunken stupor, someone got a hold of your phone, could they wreck you financially? Yeah. But again, as I said, this is digital get that cash back for me. It was And I put one in a safe. Bitcoin anywhere in the world. People who want to buy Bitcoin. you know, using your bank account, This is a specialized exchange that deals in Bitcoin, but it works just like a brokerage account.

19:56 And then somebody started thinking, hey, billion a month from the Fed right now, why would they do innovation? the concept? Was there several people? know Unix command line skills to send an identity. or the Bitcoin paper, you'll find it's online. Just like the internet doesn't belong to anyone. The discussion actually lasted about a year as he was mulling this over and discussing it.

23:23 And it puts that little lock that's using cryptography. and so he put some servers together and they could handle all of the transactions and and then eventually the service got shut down. system, which is called mining. And so if you just have a wallet, you don't do this. But if you want and that becomes a new block Find a solution for what? So as I mentioned before, there's a way to have... There's a central transaction ledger where you can see everybody's transactions.

26:51 background. It's called proof of work. how bands can spread their music that way they put their files online let You plug it into the network and it runs. Wow, look, this guy. It's the first one. that they're making this is somebody's house We need Bitcoin sex. You're pretty sure. one of the problems you will have All you have to do is take your phone.

30:03 So there are many reasons why in many different environments where money is difficult, Bitcoin's going to be good for that. Prostitution is the most ridiculous crime ever. It's so should be legal You give them money, they rub you. Come on, man. That's part of the gig. I just found out, yes, it's being used for prostitution. But let's separate ourselves from such controversial

32:46 used to be when it was shells and feathers, right? Or, you know, barter exchange. But the beauty of it is that it can, at the moment, if you think about it, there's, let's say, a billion people very limited access to international finance, to lending, to capital, to the ability to even change their money to another currency. internet is what it does, and it does it very well. But it's the internet of money, and it allows

34:48 And out of that money, $74 billion gets spent in fees, fees as high as 30 or 40%. home without paying that fee? That changes the lives of a billion people. Wow. So you envision You can send emails. the point is that we can't judge Bitcoin on the standard of the most comfortable world reserve Wow, that's really fascinating. it sends you a little text message, and you have to enter the secret code,

38:25 They just lost this, right? And that affected a lot more people than any of these thefts. the primary key, you could use the secondary key. You can do digital backups, you can do time locks, there's no finding out where it went. I mean, it's digital cache. There was a story about that guy who left his Bitcoin on his hard drive and tossed it the... Actually, all that happened

41:29 I love stories like this. And that story is great. with my student loans. That's from mining? No. thousand people knew about it. And anything. It's, it's a series of rules that everybody follows, Yeah, if he even exists, there's not even a real picture doing the mining, who have the have to do that much computing power to falsify the ledger, right?

44:34 is a lot cheaper than guards and armored trucks the person who manages to verify it first And the first one to find the solution wins, you would not be able to beat the Bitcoin system right now. Exactly. I mean, the banking system has this fortress wall of regulations around it that acts partly supposedly to protect consumers from misbehaving banks, but also serves very well to prevent competition from small banks because it's very expensive to pass all the tests, right?

47:16 And the nice thing about Bitcoin that. on banking, 100% across the board. just like someone invented electricity. Then we all learned how it worked and we all So there's nothing, there's no central location. I mean. to? I mean, if you don't want to run that software, There is no controls in there. speak TCP IP on the internet and Cisco makes, and Juniper Networks makes some others,

50:45 All of our payment systems and banking systems up to now keep trust in the system by keeping You have the power of a bank on your smartphone. There's different clients that all run Bitcoin. Right. whether it's a wallet that's written for Android or a wallet that's written for iPhone that maybe one day the government can come along and say Bitcoin is not a valid currency. It's illegal to use, using it as a crime.

53:38 Not directly, no. You'd have to convert it to you pay income tax. Is that what you do? when it's independent, when they're not being taxed by their employer, when it's not coming They might not get you for anything else. to sit in a cage for a little while and think about what you did. I mean, that would simply different news reports. Like this was four

56:48 There was another guy that I flashed up earlier that was arrested. that are operating in this truly revolutionary system that is very beneficial. collection plates and their clubs. And it's also being used by criminals occasionally to do crimes, And again, nothing happened. There are hundreds of startups that are innovating with new forms of, for example,

59:46 a lot more to bitcoin don't get fooled by the fact that you know some some things are emphasized as And the way I look at Bitcoin, I think about the possibility you can create jobs. Yeah. corruption like this type of stuff where it's it's they do something they get fined by whatever So when you see a war on drugs, what you're seeing is an engine to generate money

1:02:53 And the fine's going to be little, and we're going to make a fuckload of money. So they had a teller window slot fitting briefcase for people to take advantage. And the idea behind it is so preposterous, the idea that you're going to sell weapons to criminals so that tools it's like a guy who's a fucking carpenter you're giving him a saw and a hammer you're giving

1:06:06 $70 billion a month and giving it as corporate welfare and direct subsidies to the banks. and a lot less milk and a lot fewer eggs. And that's the beauty of it, because if you know the rules, system are sort of magnified by the solution of Bitcoin, that this being the internet of money, basically allows people to agree on who owns what and to resolve differences through

1:08:48 When someone pays me the money to buy that car, that transaction is married to the deed transferring to them. setting up a number of transactions in the blockchain, mathematical rules. And how would these things be enforced if they had to be in a court of law? So, you know, adjudication is something that you then have to deal with or it doesn't need court of law.

1:11:25 agree on what's true. It's fascinating to think that this could be one step in an ultimate The idea of community law enforcement and other things like that. built to solve it, news systems, large entertainment and marketing organizations to, you know, create and things like that. then everyone trusts Joe has a Bitcoin and will be willing to accept that

1:15:08 Now, what are the concerns as far as Bitcoin getting shut down and what repercussions or what kind of blowback, if any, have you guys received? For individuals, certainly, I don't think any country has banned it or has even attempted to ban it. manner and can change a lot of things. You know, maybe we should take a wait and see approach. year, has generated thousands of jobs.

1:17:50 or special interest groups or what have you. And so I think a lot of banks are smart enough to say, We could really make a good deal with this Bitcoin thing Music will die, right? good with this. And they're going to lose some power and leverage, but they can make some good I've invested in some Bitcoin. have already filed taxes a few times and they've used the same approach. I'm going to be filing income

1:21:20 involved in these online groups, but the actual percentage of people that are using bitcoin on a regular basis what is it one half of one half of one percent It's been a very stable and secure network that has preserved or increased in value. but it had already been growing quite rapidly. I think that's where we are with Bitcoin. The first early versions were really, really clunky. And gradually it improved.

1:23:46 Now companies are building the other applications. And there's an article that came out just a few hours ago This is off Ria Novosky. what if you use Bitcoin and then, you know, two years from now, they say it's. And I mean, what if you use Bitcoin and They didn't ban people from using it. due process of law, and there's also it's legal. If we haven't said anything about it, then it's illegal, right?

1:26:17 American banks that they've shown, American politicians, this may not be the case in other and a lot of the ways that they behave as a nation. I mean, the whole thing is magical. for some fucking reason. While Obama was in the gym They're just pissed off about Alaska still. Forget the oil and everything else. It's amazing. You know, Russia and before that,

1:29:13 They have a habit of shipping people that don't agree with them off to Siberia. A massive public outcry. on this, Now, in a lot of places in the world, when something is banned by the government, the people go, hmm, maybe I should look into that. Yeah, isn't it essentially illegal to be gay? Of affection? I love that. If you have a rainbow shirt on, a leprechaun, and a fan of rainbows. What if there's a rainbow shirt and you got a leprechaun at the end of it? What do they say then? If you have a rainbow shirt

1:31:34 in a dungeon. You know, that was like Oh, wow. And New Hampshire had a license plate that said live free or die. What? So there is an organization in the UK that will take, Now when you do that, you have to use PayPal escrow. You don't really have a choice. for new forms of insurance, new forms of escrow, aspect. in cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Litecoin. This is fascinating because on certain payment networks,

1:35:57 and I have a big problem with that. This is a fascinating time. and memes, and some of them are pump-and-dump schemes. So there's a whole range. One of the who work in it. Other coins have slightly different variations of the same theme, and some of them are based on memes, internet memes. You know, the Bitcoin economy has an actual economy behind it. It has merchants, it has retail transactions, it has startup companies that are investing and developing things with it.

1:39:26 that carries a lot of weight. So Bitcoin has already achieved a very high level of network For example, Bitcoin has So I think there's a lot of room for a lot of coins in this space. They implement new features. But that's the general competitive environment. All of these may have interesting characteristics. A lot of things in life started as a joke and then became huge things that became embedded in the culture.

1:43:28 it took it to from above 30 to below a dollar um and then there was another crash around 100 and Certainly if it was a tech stock, it would be a nice-sized tech stock. if you plot it on a graph and you plot the volatility, you'll see that every year it's bigger, then the waves get smaller by comparison. Okay. What is the cause of these fluctuations to

1:46:23 until you find someone who's going to buy it. And then that's the new price. So it will go down a bit. But if you are finding Then the next week, Central Bank of China won't let banks hold Bitcoin. Down we go. playing within these markets with fiber optic connections to this main data center, where you're dealing with nanoseconds. stretched out, you're still going to have to go, you know, so that everybody gets the same deal.

1:49:24 The Fed is printing money and handing it to the banks. So the lesser of two evils. the world at the moment it's uh 700 hang on one bitcoin is 784 us dollars on average And there's a constant creation of these? you can divide it into 100 million subunits. So basically, instead of the money in your pocket, What do you think Bitcoin's place in the world is going to be?

1:52:13 I think it will, but it might not be Bitcoin, but it will still be a cryptocurrency. We've seen transactions as big as $150 million. Who did that? and then look at your Bitcoin folder. no one knows what he looks like. Like, this is the best cell phone ever. Why would you think that that's what they would do? where there's so much mystery to it. There was a transaction from one address to another address for $150 million in a single transaction.

1:55:11 and it did happen and it has been verified and the transaction went through and they paid zero fee. Wow. When we seized Silk Road, the government, meaning we. is they're going to sell it. So Bitcoin was a key player in that whole Silk Road scandal. or whatever, Right. That's a pretty... Well, there's a lot of exaggerated claims massive crimes going on. Yeah. Which means that reading that and seeing how much of a weak case

1:58:36 It's a direct sort of connection, Once it's out of your hands. Yeah, I mean this is It's math. And you're not trusting anyone specific. It's the, as you said, the internet of money. piled on top of more derivatives by the The government has since amended that and said that they're going to now start allowing these people who run these medical marijuana stores to put their money in banks, which is a huge victory.

2:01:24 on a regular basis, and they're going to get targeted. It's just a matter of time. You're going to create victims And J. Edgar Hoover had people audited every year of their life because he didn't like handing out audits to people that were political opponents, handing out audits to people that were Paying taxes specifically for the Bitcoin earnings I've had this year. I'm fascinated by that. I mean, I pay them every year. Paying taxes specifically

2:03:33 Satoshi Nakamoto. No one's met him. we he's written a scientific paper right and before that paper and after that paper he participated matter. They invented Satoshi Nakamoto gave money to the people can come out of outing Nakamoto. So you believe that potentially this group of people And they decided to be anonymous in their delivery of this. So a lot of people in this space were involved anonymously

2:06:35 That's kind of cool. That's Satoshi? Well, I mean in terms of there's so many different theories of who... you ever watch a documentary on... works and it's simple math and people can read it, understand how it works and then use it. Boy, they're going to jump all over that one. Tower 7 held the original computer that created Bitcoin. I've met several guys like that.

2:09:18 is that the internet has changed everything. Changed my connection with just random human beings. the internet now is so co-opted and restrictive thousands of users, because it doesn't cost much to send, because it's an easy transaction, you're selling your customer. If the product's free, you're the product, right? Your personal which require concentration.

2:12:14 No, of course not. who loves the way the internet works Well, I mean, net neutrality suffered a massive setback in the courts just a couple of weeks ago or outside the mandate of the FCC, to be more accurate. Well, they wouldn't do that because it's a competitor. I think the biggest threat right now comes to companies like Netflix or things like streaming

2:14:56 Right now, I mean, they already do in some cases, but... if net neutrality weren't observed. And the Verizon, for many people who don't realize this, These places are now starting to create their own programming as well. and net neutrality on the internet since the early 90s. And they've been at the forefront of doing that, EFF.org. That's something to really be concerned with.

2:17:45 He doesn't go to Pirate Bay, you fuck mean to download a legal uh allegedly music legal music legal like nine A lot of the problem right now is that you pay for both of your infrastructure and your content in a single payment to your ISP. and Bitcoin can fix Verizon. I hope something changes with this? and I understand its implications. The last time I felt like this was 1992,

2:20:03 I'm able to build a career on it, sure, and I love doing it. it's, um, you're in a very unique position because you're really at the edge of it. When you say independent freelancer, what is your background, your educational background? Then it hit me again a second time. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No. I mean, this is not prudent investment. This is not prudent behavior financially.

2:23:07 So the key here was that I was in distributed systems and security. And then suddenly it hit me. And all of these possibilities unfolded in my head, and it was a really dizzy experience. to connect to, right? And if you keep doing that, it achieves a scale where it starts multiplying. What's the steps that you took to become a part of this? I started talking to people.

2:25:48 I'm a technical advisor in a number of Bitcoin startups. For a long time, that was my savings account until I was able to get other means. Well, I didn't know. the last year alone, it's been unbelievable. If you asked me last year, did I think Bitcoin would be at Maybe he's right. It's a bit of everything. They offer an elegant solution to decentralized money. And whether Bitcoin survives or not,

2:29:17 for Sugar Man for me. So I appreciate you coming over here, and I appreciate you giving us your knowledge Right, okay. and you'll have it in a few seconds. even a USB stick. They call it like a Klondike. Yeah, exactly. Alright. Listen, cool. Bitcoin street cred. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, exactly. All right. appreciate you coming on here and enlightening us. Thank you so much for, for having me. And,

2:31:36 I'm genuinely passionate about this because I see an elegant solution. You can recognize it in others. passionate about and so this this Bitcoin thing now is just now it's in It's A-A-N-T-O-N-O-P. me for engagements there, but We should have bought that coin and it would have been like Apple stock. Awesome. folks this weekend whatever, do what you got to do folks.

2:34:13 with many more podcasts to be scheduled That's one word, Joe in the number one, lawyer's office. LegalZoom off any and all supplements all right you fucks we love the shit out of you and we'll see you soon