Joe Rogan Experience #581 — Andreas Antonopoulos Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the jill hogan experience ah the english chick's back You know, even so, Also, the misuse of magic. That would have been pretty awesome. way off topic way early for those of you who don't know mr antinopoulos is an expert in bitcoin in another being controlled by the world bank being controlled by the national or the federal reserve But with Bitcoin, it's really useful money. It can solve a lot of problems. All I have to do

3:33 and they're not familiar with what Bitcoin is, just give them a brief description of how the Bitcoin system works. So at a very basic level, Bitcoin is internet money. It's money that you the world, instantaneous money. So it takes money from a technology of the 50s and it drags it into the 21st century kicking and screaming it would just so we can

4:55 So Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer network of money, the currency is produced at a predictable rate. So every 10 minutes, 25 Bitcoin are created. And if you do the math, and you add add up the years and you keep dividing by two, Like right now, if the Federal Reserve had a meeting on Friday, wait a minute, what are you guys going to do? was PayPal. PayPal is now

8:39 But it's great to see these advancements. A lot of interesting things are happening. making some progress here how does that happen well you know i mean what do you think the media No, they're going to say people are buying cocaine on the internet. the year and all that came from Bitcoin I just took the money from from Bitcoin There's a couple of favorite charities that I support in a number of ways.

11:22 Yeah, it's all Comedy Central. So we'll see where that goes. You won't need to cash them in. where their own currency is really bad. And this represents a global currency that may So you're basically seeing this revolution where their own currencies are really, really poor if you're looking for an investment especially if if you're day trading Bitcoin, which is about the stupidest thing

14:54 as a payment network, accept Bitcoin, then convert it to your national currency to selling things because if you're selling things online like would you sell it like say if you're And so I can say, what is $10 worth in Bitcoin? And And at the end of the day, it gets converted to dollars or sooner if you have a lot of volume. Yeah, that's called a deflationary effect, which means that if you have a currency that is deflating, where the value of the currency is increasing over time, then people will tend to hoard that currency, hold on to it,

18:33 every month instead of saving so it's also a cultural thing i think hoarding um is seen as you could pretty much buy, there's a lot of things you can buy. I trading, right? Well, since it's gone with PayPal, you could pretty much buy, or however many PayPal serves, makes your existing web store Bitcoin capable and his Bitcoin wallet, for whatever reason,

20:50 opened it up, and it's like, oh, sign up or use an existing user. with my Skype name and stuff like that. And it looks like they might want to even interview me and then they'd go to this website, and then all you have to do is then connect the application back to the website. I have a bit of petty cash in here and the rest of my Bitcoin, just like the rest of my US dollars, I keep offline.

23:17 and sat them down at a table. I'm like, oh, great. We're going to move some Bitcoin around, see how this works. So it sends the first batch And the purpose of this demonstration was there is no payment system on the planet that could do what we just did. What's the IRS's take on it now? So, for example, if I do a gig in Europe and I charge my clients in euros, I'm going to pay income tax on those euros.

25:57 then they're going to come and say, okay, you said X, prove it. show us where this bitcoin came from and where it went and i can show them is there any way i don't Sorry. That's an issue with some folks. So 0.026, for example, is $10. Other people have proposed bits, a fraction of a bitcoin for a coffee than try to do 0.0013 yes no one can do that kind of math

29:50 They're not comfortable with very high numbers either. When Bitcoin was launched, you could buy a thousand Bitcoin or even 10,000 Bitcoin for a dollar. And this was when, in the first year and a half, when nobody really had a price for Bitcoin, It was a 10,000 Bitcoin pizza. and those who were participating in the early days thought was, it's probably going to be worth

32:43 if it did have value in the future so if it was worth a quarter right then you'd use that and just give First of all, when I was flying to New Zealand, my cost was covered by the conference organizer. well aware of what's going on with him over there i i think, I mean, Kim Dotcom is such a really great personality. in the peaceful island of New Zealand, for God's sake,

35:23 to have similar resistance. you know, big talk about how they're bringing down this great criminal. And then all of the I mean, he's a money-making machine. He obviously has nothing to do with Bitcoin, illegal acts. But, you know, to talk about copyright infringements resulting in a helicopter If that's the standard of justice, I have to ask, There's 50,000 troops that are receiving checks that are human beings that don't even exist.

39:24 Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of instances of people where they're obviously doing something that's illegal and getting away with it. And my take on it is it's only then one day pay to see you in concert like you gained a fan right or you that fan stayed supporting that made music easy and convenient and accessible to people. the person receiving the five pennies still gets five pennies. It doesn't get chewed up in fees

43:17 and actually do that for a living. So until now, it was really difficult to earn money on the internet. and turning them into a profile I mean, that's always been the rub. like a link, like on Twitter. or something along those lines. if you find something similar that's free, Bang. for something that is available for free? So when you get something like a blog or a newspaper

47:13 And that means that a lot of things that may be worth $1 or $0.25 or $0.75 that people would actually pay, articles and the los angeles times is experimented with something the same. What if I could put down $2 a month and read 25 articles from all of the newspapers that I want to? I would pay for quality news content without advertising. We know people will pay for things

49:17 that you could never charge for before Is there a way, I was thinking this, Essentially what you're doing is you're hiding all that secret shit behind it and you're creating something that's much more simplistic is there a way to do that with bitcoin to take away all these weird fucking numbers and zeros and ones and point this And the third one is the price volatility.

51:23 enormous progress on the adoption and enormous progress on the user interfaces, enormous progress on the adoption, and enormous progress on the stability. Yes, absolutely. do I need, right? I remember a time when sending an email, you needed to have those skills. And each one of those companies is going to build a billion-dollar industry. Yeah. Kind of. I mean, it is, but I don't think, I don't know anyone that really uses it.

55:24 getting their subscription as a 90-day free trial from, you know, buying a Chevy or whatever? wrong maybe i'm just tapping into the wrong google plus communities and i'm just missing a whole vein I think the new, where they take, like but it's great when your phone's dead and you just want to like answer a And I'll get it as a text message? What about anybody?

57:46 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Google Voice does that for a number of customers, And it's a product they've never really advertised. the message, you separate the content type from the thing that's running on top of it. And now countries, you can only move a certain amount of money. If you want to move money that can do government money business money or consumer money and none of them mix so you can't

1:01:10 it unshackles it from all of these restrictions. different types of banks like there are banks that are primarily focused on consumer services because you have to deal with customers and they're fickle. And I've talked to a lot of banks that look at this and say, for example, I talked to a bank in Brazil. And some of the places are really, really very remote.

1:04:03 So they've actually planted cell phone towers. They look at Bitcoin and they think, well, you know what? This is a settlement and clearinghouse network. Bitcoin to take DTCC out of business, to take Swift out of business, to build our own networks that don't have a middleman? So just like, for example, in the first few years, the big phone companies were terrified of the internet and things like Skype because it threatened their long distance market.

1:07:26 You used to have to punch in the number when you would go somewhere and you would use the local pay phone. Because the main phone companies still maintain monopolies. would become obsolete. and started putting out more cameras than any camera manufacturer in the world in a year. they're facing bankruptcy. and burned. It's amazing. So why couldn't they make a play in this space?

1:10:17 Bye-bye. There's no roads. even though the companies that made horse buggies it's possible at this point in time for bank manufacturers if if i mean you know people who That's where things get really squirrely. where the alternative really does win. and boom, the entire industry flipped telephony. And so you see this leapfrogging of technology. Now, as to the Federal Reserve,

1:14:28 organization has the ability to create an infinite amount of money, set the interest rates between Right. the amount of money that's being exchanged over between these banks the amount of influence It has become incredibly fragile. It does look like a coke habit. But if you follow your cocaine addict analysis, But the amount of power that the bank has,

1:18:04 who choose a representative. And generating, printing the money, but generating incredible sums of money because of the fact they print the money. sometime in the 20th century the this idea of governments being able to print unlimited money was considered the scientific approach to money. war on a scale that had never happened before. And now you end up with economies like the US,

1:21:14 into fighting a new enemy on a new battlefront. But none of that money is going to improve schools, war that doesn't affect the vast majority of the population. And that has become the new form of economic activity. It's this tremendously futuristic technology, one that neither Star Trek nor Star Wars, And one of the things he printed was money. Because at the time, money was made by banks and by states.

1:23:49 And that was one of the main reasons that the British crown was pissed off. It was because all of these little free state money printing operations were sucking taxes out of her queen's money. In fact, that worked pretty well for many, many centuries. them into place is a machine that that's that relies on war it needs war and it's one of those even the very communications of political campaigns and elections

1:26:15 raising a lot of advocates and followers on the internet. They could keep him off TV, And suddenly the internet had influence in communications. for elections to the people. Well, and whenever you have new variables that people start adopting, It's a blink, a blink in time. How could they? The idea of information has shifted so radically talking to someone who was saying they wrote a book on the Jetsons, Jeffrey Tucker from Liberty.me.

1:30:38 they just gave up they just don't talk about it at all there is no money in star trek that's so And the same thing in a lot of sci-fi. that didn't exist before and groups of people can own money. But machines cannot own, operate, and exchange money on their Isn't that like auto-pay similar? And if this one isn't successful, it shrinks the amount of hosting.

1:33:55 But it opens a door to something that is completely crazy sci-fi level and when you take that and you connect it to uh i'm sure you've been paying We sort of know it exists, but we try to put it away. or actually has the ability to think, propagate ideas, it keeps its existence well there are ways you can think about it and you know for the time being

1:36:39 send part of the endowment for charitable contributions. And now you have a charitable organization It's so overused. such as an agreement between two people to buy and sell a house. And you can now take that and run that as a contract on the network. And it can handle not just the payment, and the payment itself authorizes the payer want anything that you can pump oil high fructose corn syrup coffee whatever and it's regulated by

1:39:39 Have any gas stations adopted Bitcoin yet? And that means you can get robbed. need to do is arrange to meet the car buyer near a bank branch go in with the car buyer near a bank branch, go in with the car buyer, have them deposit the check or bank draft, They're not worried I'm going to rob them because they don't have any cash on them. So your key isn't just a metal key.

1:43:08 And that digital token unlocks the car. owner welcome and i drive away from getting hacked well that's the beauty of it the security isn't So like right now, when you did this car thing. Seconds. All the people that are mining Bitcoin are participating in securing it, there's a signature by the original owner. My Bitcoin exists because it was properly signed from a piece of Bitcoin

1:45:53 once it's validated it, uses the IP address to recognize the global route, also and understanding exactly how it works. trust that I've got that money in my account done. So at that point, I can give the key over. to recognize you would be using the handoff yeah you would be using the block you would replace Lost Jennifer Lawrence's butt pictures. That's a broken design.

1:49:40 they can't change that transaction, Use your credit card online? That connection has to be encrypted. Yes. Chirp, and there are implementations of Bitcoin It's like a modem, right? means that you can transmit it over anything. Everybody knows what they are. Mm-hmm. But if it's digital money incorporated into the actual song itself, then that cannot be done.

1:53:57 So people who say, you know, we're going to stop Bitcoin transactions from being transmitted. I could be living, it's a code. I could be living in the most oppressive country in the world. Whoa! Right. of the photograph of the you know the cover cover art right which is a matter of simply being able which you can download as a PDF to recreate not just one transaction, but all of the transaction, all of the addresses,

1:57:24 the form of a book. It's just like Morse code. Among, yes, among others, I think they used, Yeah, secret writing is an old art. Yeah. You know, I mean, imagine an oppressive government. with a radio. And you could do it in a matter of seconds. a railroad line, a long piece of steel That is fucking wild. no intermediaries the way it works is a decentralized network the way it turns money

2:01:56 In a sense, it parallels the internet itself in that regard, right? I've been talking about this being the 1992 to 1994 period. It's gnarly. as someone said recently at the conference, just do it by turning on PayPal now. I don't know, man. covered in tattoos let's just not listen to him and keep making millions get out of here kid back there and seeing all the businesses that are spawning out of this this legalized marijuana

2:05:14 Gino needs to get on that shit. a gift card right or a reward point miles or something else system or some kind of undercover cops because why would they go through the I mean, since you started coming on here, and the discussion of Bitcoin has escalated. And, you know, that was the conversation. But you're beginning to see the naysayers There is something disruptive about this technology, and we're looking into it seriously.

2:08:50 banned bitcoin applications yes oh they reverted that yes four months ago five months ago they had Apple had a whole different set of rules like that. But really, the real reason for this, and we said that six months ago, was Apple was and wallet technology. That's what Apple Pay does, right? trying to like do something with my voice here. It'll melt the ice.

2:11:35 Like a little Wi-Fi thing? And I'm really banking on that effect because Apple will make people familiar with mobile wallets, the idea of tap and pay that are restrictive. from micropayments to cross-border Got people in Sub-Saharan Africa, in South Africa, in Latin America? Five billion people having international banking for the first time in history. I mean, that gives me shivers. That is the most revolutionary aspect of this technology. It's not making,

2:14:59 but i mean in in this you know and well in the in the third world you're talking about in the in They do have money. To do anything, you have to walk 10, 20 miles to transact. text messaging cell phones so you bring together those two technologies and you can create account, but they could afford to have a cell phone contract. This is how messed up the banking

2:18:23 transfer M-PESA outside the country. You can't use it for remittances. It's specific to one currency and it's still that this organization has some kind of role or authority. Linux, the operating system, has a foundation, pays a lot of developers. have like two or three of the directors in that facing massive lawsuits or indictments or how's Some form of accountability.

2:21:25 And it was the first exchange. So it was the first place where you could trade your bitcoins for US dollars, Japanese yen and euros. And it was the first exchange. What is it a scenario? I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it was it was a scenario where the landscape had changed so quickly. we now know that Karpeles continued to run the operation where he would pay old customers out

2:23:06 and you give all of the keys to one person, in this system and it in many ways highlights the positive attributes that bitcoin share peer-to-peer I'm out. information about how to get into Bitcoin, what it is. That's run, again, by an association of So when I go speaking, like I went to Australia, Go and meet people who are into Bitcoin and learn about it.

2:26:23 how to use bitcoin i spent a year and a half working on that I'm trying to get Morgan Freeman It's a technical book. with a lot of clout You can buy it. And I will tell you that as many have discovered in this space, they will. That's why you're drinking a bottle of water when you can get free water from the tap. you invest in the skills. We're hiring thousands of people in this industry in order to do the software development.

2:30:20 The first two chapters are accessible to anyone. So you've immersed yourself in this over the period of X amount of years. I'm not a professional programmer. And I learned more about Bitcoin by writing the book. I taught. You can kind of exchange information and go over the facts of it or the building blocks of it. other people how to do it wow it's a truism across if you want to get really good at that. I need to start teaching other people how to do it. Wow. It's a truism across.

2:33:52 but I understood it at a relatively superficial level just to use it. just absorbing information and the the depth of that absorption like there's some people that i well they're they're all weirdos no they're all the technical geniuses who um spend most of the What are you missing? They write code all the time. that could go wrong in a transaction.

2:37:05 Well, that's one of the weird things about being a human being. There's no question about it. We wouldn't be online because there'd be no online. and are doing things that are incredible. And I meet these people and I say, there's a reason why because i was spending 18 hours a day reading everything i could about it writing code forgot to eat communicating i forgot to eat

2:39:11 F-U-G-E? And what, so what year was this? mathematics behind it. I learned those mathematics in high school, but I already was practicing that I, But after that, I managed to find a more healthy balance. really crazy fucks that will not eat for months at a time and lose 18 pounds because you find figured out that there was something there, right? And we see the same thing in history again and

2:43:34 And why don't you use traditional, good, working kerosene? It's a matter of subtlety. the same rabbit hole as me in exactly the same way and have come out of the other side transformed had a fun ride. I'm enjoying this. But if they're right, we're changing the world. It doesn't matter how many PhDs in economics write very long papers telling me it's not money.

2:46:05 I've been hitting refresh all day. oh, this crazy fuck because they found out about Brian. the value of what they're doing instead of being exploited mostly by men and mostly through It's a very good point. money exists in every culture and is created by every culture, even by children. Toddlers create So the two most traded, well, I would say the three most traded commodities in the world are food, sex, and recreational narcotics.

2:49:34 the three most traded commodities in the world is not money. legal because it's a skill. These are services that people provide to people. We just have this And we're only insane because of these echoes of the puritanical values of the dipshits that were dressed up like pilgrims and got on fucking rafts and floated over here from Europe. but it is true.

2:52:06 It's a huge feature. I don't know what you foresee taking place on the horizon, but I'm in. I'm in. That's the at sign. Thank you very much, sir.