“We are at the Internet moment of 1995 with Bitcoin... we’re standing on the floor of the exponential curve coming up.“
Yan Pritzker is co-founder and CTO of Swan Bitcoin, a Bitcoin investment service that allows users to set up a recurring Bitcoin purchase plan. He is the author of Inventing Bitcoin.
Bitcoin represents the inevitable progression into the digital age where money is digital too. Bitcoin removes the central intermediaries required for financial transactions that serve as barriers for many around the globe. Bitcoin guards against the kind of monetary policy that can render a person’s savings worthless. This has been seen in places like the Soviet Union. “Americans may not always be aware of what’s going on in the rest of the world with how money works because we live in a very different system. We basically make the world reserve currency.”
Due to the distributive nature of Bitcoin and its network effect, it becomes stronger and more valuable as more people enter the space; Bitcoin becomes more de-risked as adoption grows. “We are at the Internet moment of 1995 with Bitcoin... we’re standing on the floor of the exponential curve coming up.“
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Yan Pritzker
Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer
Swan
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:08)
Hello everyone and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is the same as our goal at our SALT Conferences, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.
John Darsie: (00:38)
And we're thrilled today to bring you the latest episode in our digital asset series. Certainly one of those ideas that we'd like to cover at SALT that we think is changing the world fundamentally, and we're excited to bring you a guest who we think provides one of the best resources out there for people that are just learning about Bitcoin.
John Darsie: (00:54)
We love when those types of people turn into these talks, so they can start to go down the rabbit hole, if you will, that we started going down a few years ago that landed us on Bitcoin. So our guest today is Yan Pritzker, he's the co-founder and chief technology officer at Swan Bitcoin. He spent the last 20 years as an engineer and product and technology leader for early stage startups.
John Darsie: (01:17)
In 2012, he was the co-founding CTO at reverb.com, which was acquired by Etsy for 275 million in Fiat dollars in 2019. While he was exposed to Bitcoin in early 2011, Yan didn't take it seriously until about 2016 when he began to research it on a daily basis. By 2018, he decided that it was the most important thing he could be working on and left Reverb to start consulting for Bitcoin related companies prior to launching Swan together with Corey Klipstein in 2019.
John Darsie: (01:50)
Yan is the author of the book that I referenced earlier, it's called Inventing Bitcoin. And again, if you're new to the space and even if you're not, and you still want to get a stronger technical understanding of how Bitcoin works, there's no better book out there to start with than Inventing Bitcoin by Yan Pritzker.
John Darsie: (02:06)
Posting today's talk is Brett Messing, president and chief operating officer at SkyBridge Capital. Before I turn it over to Brett to conduct most of the interview, he's sort of our resident Bitcoin maximalist here at SkyBridge. Although we're all very enthusiastic about our entrance into the space.
John Darsie: (02:21)
I want to talk to you about Inventing Bitcoin for a second. So obviously we only have 45 minutes or so here, and you could probably go on for much longer than that talking about all the intricacies of Bitcoin. But if someone was coming to you for the first time saying, "I know nothing about Bitcoin, could you explain it to me in a succinct way relatively quickly." How would you do it sort of going through the outline of your book?
Yan Pritzker: (02:47)
The book is very much focused on understanding Bitcoin as money because this is the key understanding for me that really flipped me. I started writing the book and the subtitle of the book is the decentralized technology blah, blah, blah. And I really started thinking about Bitcoin as technology when I was writing the book, but I very quickly flipped my own thinking to Bitcoin as money.
Yan Pritzker: (03:06)
So succinctly Bitcoin is a new form of money and it's very similar to the digital money that we already know, with digital dollars, with Apple Pay and Google Pay and PayPal and all of that, except for there's no intermediary. And that's a really key point because instead of those dollars flowing over these systems which are either governments or corporate systems, now there's these Bitcoins are flowing between peers. Peer to peer cash is the subtitle of the Bitcoin white paper.
Yan Pritzker: (03:32)
So Bitcoin is a new type of money that kind of takes us into a different world where we don't need these centralized entities in the middle of every transaction where they can censor it, they can change the monetary policy on us and they can make our money worthless. I do come from a country that did that to the money, which is the former Soviet Union.
Yan Pritzker: (03:53)
So Americans may not be always kind of aware of what's going on in the rest of the world with how money works, because we live in a very different system here. We basically make the world's reserve currency and we have that privilege. But everybody else lives in a very different society. And we are all going to be living in a digital society where all of our money will be digital.
Yan Pritzker: (04:12)
So I always think about Bitcoin as a new form of money for a digital society, native to that idea of internet money, but it's open source, it's borderless, and it's not under anybody's control, which is really important for us to have or to continue to have a free society.
John Darsie: (04:26)
And from a technical perspective, again, without going too deep into the science, Bitcoin sort of solves the Byzantine General's problem, which you write about and Vijay Boyapati who we're also having on SALT Talks wrote about in his Bullish Case for Bitcoin. But how does that puzzle work? How do you remove the intermediary in a way that still maintains trust verification and everything you need to operate a financial system?
Yan Pritzker: (04:51)
So Bitcoin is a system that anybody can join. That's really a difference with the financial system. In order for you to transact, you need to have a bank in the middle or a company and that company or bank is specially licensed by the government to do these kinds of things. With Bitcoin, in order to participate in the network, all you have to do is run some software on your computer and anybody can do that.
Yan Pritzker: (05:10)
So Bitcoin takes that ledger that your bank typically has and in your bank there's a database and there's some numbers in it. It says how much money does everybody have? And there is guards around that database. There's either a physical security guards, there's software intrusion systems. There's all this security around that, but essentially it's just a database with the numbers in it.
Yan Pritzker: (05:28)
Bitcoin is very similar. It's just a database with numbers in it. But the difference is that everybody has a copy of the database and anybody can participate in that. Bitcoin provides the same idea that your bank does with the security, but in Bitcoin that security is provided through the usage of real world resources, which is energy. We actually expend electrical energy and very large quantities of it in order to secure Bitcoin from attacks or somebody basically changing those numbers on us.
Yan Pritzker: (05:55)
And that allows anybody in the world wants to participate in the process that we call mining, which is really the production of Bitcoin and also the securing of Bitcoin transactions. It allows that process to be fully trustless, meaning we don't actually have to worry about who these people are that are doing the mining. We don't have to worry about whether they're following the rules, because everybody basically checks that the work that they're doing is correct. And there's a system of checks and balances there that keeps the whole system functioning very similar to how our government has checks and balances, but I would argue even stronger.
John Darsie: (06:26)
Well, we run a full node here at SkyBridge and the power of the Bitcoin network is how distributed it is. And everybody who's involved in it is obviously they have something invested in protecting the integrity of the network. So we're proud to do our small part in that process, but I'll turn it over to Brett, to dive a little deeper into Bitcoin intellectually with you for the rest of the conversation.
Yan Pritzker: (06:49)
Thanks.
Brett Messing: (06:49)
Hey Yan, thanks for joining us. Let me just ... I want to hold up your book so everyone can see-
Yan Pritzker: (06:54)
There you go.
Brett Messing: (06:54)
Because anyone interested in Bitcoin should buy the book. I think your journey is interesting and I think you can help us help other people, which is there's a question we get asked often. So you found Bitcoin in 2011, I'm assuming it was 10 bucks or less. You re-engage with it in 2016, it's probably 500-ish. Maybe you buy some in, I'll let you speak. And then you start building a business when it's 10,000. It's kind of it's up 20X.
Brett Messing: (07:26)
So I think you might know where I'm going with this. We get asked a lot am I too late? It feels late, it's hard enough to buy Bitcoin the first time for a new buyer because you're remembering 2017 and Jimmy Fallon making fun of it and your neighbor's kid asking you about it. And it's something you couldn't take serious and now you realize you might have to, but it's still so hard.
Brett Messing: (07:49)
And then when you couple that with being the guy who top ticks it, I think it just makes it difficult. So how did you think about that? And then how do you think others who are addressing it here today at 50,000s think about it?
Yan Pritzker: (08:06)
So I think it's a very common story that people have multiple touch points with Bitcoin. As you said, my first touch point was in 2011 and I heard about it on Slashdot which was a website for nerds. I think it still exists, not very popular anymore. But essentially it had tech news and it said, "Hey, there's this open-source payment system people are building." I said, "That's interesting. And maybe I'll buy some." Bought some at 30 bucks, watched it go down to $2 and just exited the market?
Yan Pritzker: (08:29)
I just thought, "Okay, I've been taken for a fool." I mean, I didn't have very much money in that. I had like $1000 in. But just the feeling that you got taken for a fool is so strong and you just sell the bottom, you get out of it and you never look at it again. And that's exactly what happened to me. And in 2011, I did that.
Yan Pritzker: (08:44)
Now 2013, there was a change in the market. The price was actually $1000 when I kind of revisited in 2013. So it's gone up tremendously from my first experience at 30. And what made me think of it differently is now there was an app called Coinbase and it was pretty shiny, it looked nice, looked like somebody had put the time into to do it right.
Yan Pritzker: (09:04)
And it was a very different world from in 2011 when you were buying on a very shady exchange called Mt. Gox, was really poor user interface. You have to wire money to very questionable places. And it was basically the change in user experience that made me think, you know what? Maybe there's something here. And then in 2016, again, you had this massive shift in the way that people were thinking about Bitcoin. You had more and more companies coming into it. You had more building. And for me as an engineer and as a startup person, I started seeing an ecosystem emerge.
Yan Pritzker: (09:32)
And watching an ecosystem emerging around something, you start to think of it differently. You don't think of it as this, "Oh, this is just this thing that's worth X amount of dollars." No, actually it's a system and there's infrastructure being built. And that makes you wake up and say, "Okay, well, why are people building infrastructure on this?" There must be something more to it.
Yan Pritzker: (09:48)
I think as the price grows and as the adoption grows, what we're actually creating here is essentially an unstoppable monster. So price is a very good measure of adoption but the reason the price is going up is because there's more demand. It's very simple because Bitcoin supply is very constrained. So the demand goes up, the price goes up.
Yan Pritzker: (10:04)
So as price goes up, more money is invested in infrastructure, more money is invested in mining. For example, in 2011 or 2013, miners were just people with a machine in their garage. Now miners are public companies with millions of dollars at stake, sometimes hundreds of millions, billion dollar market caps.
Yan Pritzker: (10:21)
So it's a dramatic shift in how the network has evolved. And that means that we're at a different place. And this year we know there's a major development with public companies now entering into the space. Tesla, MicroStrategy, or a dozen other companies that are now buying large quantities of Bitcoin at these prices. So now you have to ask yourself, why are they doing that and how many more companies behind them will follow? And we know that there's very, very large demand for this. So for me it's actually being de-risked as it goes further.
Yan Pritzker: (10:49)
All of these kinds of early narratives around Bitcoin is for criminals or Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme are being disproven every day as more and more people and more and more companies and smart people enter the space. Folks like Jack Dorsey and Peter Thiel don't just do things for fun. They're smart people and they're doing things because they have a reason. So if you really pay attention to these folks, and you also recognize that the ability to enter into Bitcoin, isn't even there for some of them.
Yan Pritzker: (11:14)
If you're $100 billion dollar asset manager, it's very difficult for you to buy a significant stake in Bitcoin, just because of the liquidity and that liquidity is growing every day. So for me, it's not at all about am I too late, is that we're actually too early. If you look at the adoption of Bitcoin, how many per cent of the world has any Bitcoin?
Yan Pritzker: (11:33)
It's certainly a single digits. It's probably under 5%, almost certainly under 2% with any significant allocation. So if you look at that, it's kind of like internet in 1995, where you could have said, "Hey, the internet sucks. It's over, it's been two decades. It's not going anywhere." And people have said that. There's a Newsweek article by Cliff Stoll in 1995, that totally dismissed the internet, and said, "My local mall is doing more business in a day than the internet does in a month." But that was at a time when internet penetration worldwide was half a percent and it was 5% in America.
Yan Pritzker: (12:04)
And I would argue, we are at the internet moment of 1995 right now in Bitcoin, where that's exactly the penetration we have in the world. And we can see it growing exponentially. And you can either dismiss it and say I missed the boat, or you can realize that we're standing on the floor of the exponential curve that's just coming up.
Brett Messing: (12:23)
Thank you. That's interesting. I have a lot of thoughts. I'm trying to think where to go to it. It does seem to me that the defining feature of Bitcoin is the restricted supply. And that it's predictable and it doesn't respond to demand. But as Bitcoin goes up, each coin is worth so much more. So I was thinking about Square. So Square issued earnings yesterday, there was a lot of focus on the fact that they put 170 million of their balance sheet into Bitcoin, which is exciting.
Brett Messing: (12:57)
But if you looked at the amount of Bitcoin they sold to their customers, quarter over quarter, it sort of flattened. It went from like 1.6 billion or 1.7 billion. And if you look at where the price is today relative to where it was in the third quarter, it's up about 4X. So their contribution to the supply demand, balance imbalance is less significant materially so. So doesn't Bitcoin have to become an institutional asset to maintain this price?
Yan Pritzker: (13:31)
Well, I think there's interest from institutions certainly this year. And I think one of the ways you can explain the retail cool off if you will, of Bitcoin is probably because people are looking at it and saying, "Hey, this thing just went up 10X from March, 4X in the last couple of months. Why would I buy the top?" Everybody's thinking they're buying the top.
Yan Pritzker: (13:48)
And when you're a retail investor ... Which is, I mean, I'm happy that they're thinking that way. Maybe they're being a little smarter than the 2017 when everybody did buy the top. And then the top only lasted a few hours, but this time, it seems a little bit different. I mean, these prices are sticking around for weeks, now months, and maybe we've been kind of grinding from 30,000 to 50,000. I do think there's a difference in how institutions are thinking about it.
Yan Pritzker: (14:11)
And as both from my own experience at Swan, because I mean we onboard smaller businesses, but there's certainly no small and medium-sized businesses that are not going to sell tomorrow. They're here for 10 years, 50 years. Some of them are looking at it as something that they're going to just keep in the family and pass on for generations. So it's a very different mindset. So I'm not too worried that retail people are buying less on Square.
Yan Pritzker: (14:32)
Actually, they shouldn't be buying on Square because there's ridiculous withdrawal limits. So don't do that. But I think there is a certain amount of cool off there. I wouldn't use Square as the judge of how Bitcoin is being sold at all. We know, for example, there's $25 billion of interest at NYDIG right now from institutions.
Yan Pritzker: (14:49)
Again, I believe that's because it's just very, very early. It's not going to be 25 billion. It's going to be 250 billion next year, potentially. So we're looking at the beginning of that cycle. And so yes, institutions are going to be adopting it, but you also have to look at what's going on all over the world. We are in the such an American bubble here. And I just have to hammer this home for people who have never been outside the US or haven't looked at financial systems outside the US.
Yan Pritzker: (15:14)
Right now in Argentina, you cannot buy more than 200 American dollars per month. That's Argentina, a reasonably developed first world country, if you will, that's having some issues with their currency. That problem is all over the world. Nigeria, Libya, Turkey, Iran in all of those countries, people are buying Bitcoin. And it's going to be much smaller amounts than institutions obviously, but in mass, as billions of people enter into Bitcoin and hundreds or thousands of institutions do, you're going to see an appreciation in the price. You're going to see an appreciation in adoption. It's hard to see how that doesn't happen.
Brett Messing: (15:48)
I want to push back on that just a little bit. And at the risk of sounding parochial, I mean I think you bring a unique perspective and clearly in the early years, Bitcoin appealed to people in places outside of the US. They got it immediately because they lived through currency collapses. But if you think about what happened in the fall, it was some combination of Michael Saylor, Square, the gray scale vacuuming up and PayPal.
Brett Messing: (16:17)
Four US actors, it just feels like the US financial system is so critical. When people say, "Well, if the US banned Bitcoin, I'll just go somewhere else and sell my Bitcoin." Well, that's fine, but Bitcoin is going to be worth 75% less than it was the day before the US banned it because BlackRock is not going to hold it. It's like you can just go through, so isn't the US important just because of its role in financial markets?
Yan Pritzker: (16:48)
No, I would agree with that. Absolutely. I think the US is important and it's kind of like you just have to think about it proportionally where's the wealth? The wealth is here. So the wealth and the knowledge frankly, is here. So we have the access to the Bitcoin and we should be buying it. The US is absolutely in a position to be a world leader here whether they voluntarily give this position up by banning is a question I don't think it's going to happen because frankly I mean the government is run by corporations and the corporations are now buying Bitcoin.
Yan Pritzker: (17:15)
So I don't really see that happening. We also have senators that are now Bitcoin friendly on the banking committee. So I don't see that ban happening. It's also a big free speech problem. But even if it did, it would be the America basically as if America said, "Oh, you know what? Well, we're just going to ban gold. We're not going to allow our central bank to hold the gold." And like you're pricing it. You're taking yourself out of this system, which is clearly the future of money. And yes, it may cause a dip in the price but another country that is not as scrupulous as the US is going to come in and do that.
Yan Pritzker: (17:46)
So somebody's going to take the reins on this thing. But yes, I do think the US is systemically important in the sense of adoption. Yes they're driving the adoption right now. But just like with the internet, 1995, 5% was in the US, half a percent worldwide. The US was the leader in the internet. And it's good that they continue that leadership and continue encouraging that innovation instead of saying, "Oh we're going to ban open networks and we're going to force everybody to register to run a website."
Yan Pritzker: (18:13)
They could have done that too and they didn't. So I think the US is as pretty smart as far as the regulation is concerned. I think they're going to wake up to this idea that this is innovation, this unlocks unlimited financial potential and it makes us a world leader when it comes down to the Bitcoin replacing the reserve currency. If that ever happens, we better have our beds hedged. You don't want to be at a zero allocation if Bitcoin starts to be used for all trade.
Brett Messing: (18:40)
Does it bother you that we have sort of people that are the head of a sort of regulatory system here in Europe, sort of peeing on Bitcoin at every opportunity, for lack of a better word. I'm talking about obviously Janet Yellen and Christine Legarde.
Yan Pritzker: (18:58)
It doesn't bother me. I mean, they're pretty ... Frankly they're kind of aging themselves out. I mean, if you look at the adoption of Bitcoin, it is very stratified by age. I would argue that probably folks like in the boomer generation, at least for us, they're the majority of the money is coming from them. But the numbers are coming from the millennials people, gen X. So I do think there's a certain amount of old guard that's just going to get turned over.
Yan Pritzker: (19:21)
And also that I mean Bitcoin threatens their entire job. What would be the job of Janet Yellen, or it would look very different than on a Bitcoin standard. So I think it is a big threatening thing. It's kind of like the horse salesman saying cars are noisy and dirty. And it's just going to be a generational shift as people will think of it differently. So I'm not too worried about them saying these things, they're going to have to say them until they are forced not to say them.
Brett Messing: (19:52)
Do you worry about the bands around the globe between China and India, some African countries. We're probably approaching half the world population where Bitcoin has been banned.
Yan Pritzker: (20:06)
I don't know that that's true. I mean, there's definitely been some gray area stuff going on. I don't know if it's half the world where it's banned. I'm not sure about that number. Maybe you have better data than I do, but-
Brett Messing: (20:19)
Wasn't sure if you have 40%. So I was just rounding for [crosstalk 00:20:22].
Yan Pritzker: (20:23)
But hold on a second. If it's abandoned China, then why is all of the Bitcoin mining in China? It's not banned in China and people are getting Bitcoin out of China as well. So it's very hard to stop Bitcoin. And another thing to think about is every time it has been banned in any sort of way, whether it be restrictions on trade or whatever, it causes the local price of Bitcoin to skyrocket. And what does that do? It creates the black markets and what do black markets do? They topple governments. Historically, that's what they do.
Yan Pritzker: (20:51)
If the currency of your local government is weak. And the black market currency is strong, that black market currency starts to gain usage and then game over.
Brett Messing: (21:03)
Yan I'm only asking you these things because I've been accused of being ragingly bullish, so help me moderate a little bit here.
Yan Pritzker: (21:10)
I appreciate that. I'm also raging bullish so it's very difficult.
Brett Messing: (21:12)
To quote a friend Raul Paul, I'm irresponsibly [crosstalk 00:21:17].
John Darsie: (21:17)
We've been told we have to be balanced in these conversations.
Yan Pritzker: (21:19)
Yes, balanced.
Brett Messing: (21:21)
So that's what I'm striving for. We'll have an off Robert cheerleading session after. Can we talk about particularly given your background and the way I think you probably think about things. I'm interested in, what kind of valuation methodology you use or you think people should use. Because it'd be just at a very high level where capital's competing with each other, stocks are competing with bonds, and right now gold is ... So capital is looking for the best pace to allocate it.
Brett Messing: (21:50)
And I think most traditional investors will look for ... How do they know if it's cheap or it's expensive? How do you think people should think about Bitcoin in that context?
Yan Pritzker: (21:59)
Yeah, it's very tricky because I think traditional investors always look at what are the cash flows? What am I getting? What am I actually buying here? You're not buying a cash flow, yielding asset with Bitcoin. You're buying an adoption curve of the future of money, which is a very different thing. And I think a lot of people are still thinking of Bitcoin as a hedge or as an asset in their portfolio with a high sharp ratio or you name it.
Yan Pritzker: (22:22)
I really think that's a flawed way of thinking about it. What you really have to ask yourself is what percentage of the world's value would be stored on a network that allowed that value to move freely, borderlessly, frictionlessly, as opposed to sending money from America to Venezuela and getting horrible fake exchange rates in the middle and getting censorship and getting that money stolen or getting it lost in the bank to bank settlement system, versus I can send $1 billion dollars in a minute to any country in the world instantly.
Yan Pritzker: (22:56)
That's a pretty different experience of money. So the question is what percentage of the world's wealth would be interested in that kind of functionality. You can look at things like the stock market, real estate, gold, all of these things, they have a certain ... And I'm not an economist so this is just me parroting things that I've learned, but these things have a certain amount of money-ness.
Yan Pritzker: (23:16)
The reason people buy the stocks when they have cheap money, what we're seeing Saylor do, he's taking a loan for 0%. He's buying Bitcoin. They can buy a Bitcoin, they can buy real estate, they can buy stocks, they can buy things that are highly liquid, easy to sell and they can park their value in these things. And so the question is, what percentage of those assets are ... What percentage of my house is worth X because I'm living in it versus because I'm going to be able to resell it later.
Yan Pritzker: (23:43)
For example, I live in a neighborhood that is constrained. There's only 100 houses in this neighborhood and you can't build inside of it. So that's it. So my house retains its value really, really well. Because I know that anytime I want to, I can leave the resell at instant demand. Other places where there's unlimited land, they don't hold value so well. So you see people buying a luxury condo in New York for $10 million and holding it and nobody's living there just because of the store of value.
Yan Pritzker: (24:08)
So when you're talking about those kinds of functions, how much better is Bitcoin at that than those other things? And I would argue almost infinitely because a house it has its use value and has its kind of money-ness premium. And then stocks like you have Tesla, it has its future cash flows, but it also has it's premium just because we think it might be easy to sell somebody else, a greater fool, if you will.
Yan Pritzker: (24:30)
Bitcoin is better at those things because it's all pure monetary premium, it's purely money, it's literally cash. So if you believe that, then the way you have to value it as what percentage of the world will want to store their wealth in cash if that cash didn't lose value. And I think that's a very high percentage. I don't know what that number is, but it's certainly tens to hundreds of trillions quite easily.
Brett Messing: (24:54)
I agree. How do you think about Bitcoin volatility? We've had we had a 25 plus percent pullback in January. We had a 22 or 23% pullback this week. I guess personally and at Swan, what are you telling clients? Was your phone ringing a lot this week?
Yan Pritzker: (25:24)
Frankly, no, which is very interesting. So we've only ever had one person sell and that person just had to take some money off the table for personal reasons. We don't actually have a sell button right now on our website. We encourage everybody to hold their Bitcoin for a very long time.
Yan Pritzker: (25:41)
We open up IRAs and Trusts where people are passing on the Bitcoin to their children. The companies that we're onboarding are all looking at it at a 10 plus year horizon. Most of them beyond that. Again, a lot of these are family businesses where they're thinking about keeping Bitcoins-
Brett Messing: (25:54)
You're going to get the opposite of Robinhood. [crosstalk 00:25:57].
Yan Pritzker: (25:57)
Literally yeah. I mean completely the opposite. And I think this is very interesting. This shift to Bitcoin as a store of value, as an inheritance asset, as a long-term play is relatively new. I don't think that's the case in 2017. And that was people just getting retail FOMO, trying to trade all their crypto assets and basically just getting wrecked buying the top.
Yan Pritzker: (26:18)
It's a very different experience right now. People are really thinking about it for the longterm. And with that in mind, the volatility is really not a problem. Again, yes, it goes down by 20 or 30%, but then it goes up by 10X. So I would I would ask where's the problem if you're really in it for the long-term, there shouldn't be any issues with volatility. You can always size your investments to your comfort level.
Yan Pritzker: (26:39)
So I think it's what it is. Dollar cost averaging is we highly promote. Obviously it's kind of how we launched, but dollar cost averaging really it's a very hard to lose strategy on Bitcoin. If you look at it in any three-year timeframe, you're pretty much up. So it's very ... As long as you're willing to stick around three to five years, basically enough to live past the having cycle you should be okay.
Yan Pritzker: (27:01)
And again, looking at it at a 10 year horizon, there's no issue about volatility at all. You can't have Bitcoin without volatility. It's being adopted by people in bursts. So you're going to have that volatility as it gets overvalued and it kind of comes down a little bit.
Brett Messing: (27:17)
Although as Anthony says, everyone's a longterm investor till they have short term losses. So it's-
Yan Pritzker: (27:25)
I really believe that Bitcoin is changing people's emotional ability. Before I used to worry about my stock portfolio, my S&P going down with two or three points in a day, it would be like, "Oh my God, that S&M is dipping. I'm losing a lot of money." Now I look at a Bitcoin dip, 20, 30%. I mean, we're talking about a lot of money here. I don't blink, I don't think about it. And I know that that's the case for a lot of folks that get into Bitcoin because the volatility actually just trains you out of your system to even worry about it. Just because it is so volatile, you have to eventually start ignoring it, or you're just not going to be able to sleep.
Brett Messing: (27:56)
So here's my theory on why that's the case. I think it's true, and you're probably too young for this. Disney used to have these e-ticket rides. When you go to Disney World, the rides were based on how intense they were. Bitcoin is like a Z ticket ride. So when you get on the ride, you know what you're doing, you know what I mean? You're going in with open eyes. It's not like someone's buying GE stock and well all of a sudden it got bottled. All right. So I think probably-
Yan Pritzker: (28:27)
I think that's a good point but I also think though that this has changed in the last couple of years, because in 2017, when people were getting into it, I don't think they knew that what kind of ride they were getting on. They just saw the number going up and they wanted to buy it. And then all of a sudden it started crashing like crazy. But now I think with more history behind us and a little bit of a rear view mirror, it's easier to see that Bitcoin does have these really big "bubbles" that then pop up, but they pop at a two or 3X above their previous top and it's not an issue in long-term.
Brett Messing: (28:55)
Sounds good. That's a good segue. Do you think the cycles continue this way?
Yan Pritzker: (29:02)
It's very hard to say. I mean, Bitcoin has a very interesting release schedule where it's tapering off and we're having less and less Bitcoin released over time. So for the folks that don't know, Bitcoin is actually going to continue to distribute all the way in the year 2140 or a little bit ahead of that. So we have 100 years ahead of us of Bitcoin mining, but it's a smaller and smaller and smaller amounts.
Yan Pritzker: (29:21)
So I think we're going to see different behavior potentially as the amount of Bitcoin on the market shrinks. And people start to really understand the scarcity of it. And perhaps that's what we're seeing now with this year, because one of the differences this year versus 2017, is that we're actually seeing a net outflow or a large outflow. I'm not sure if it's net outflow, but a large outflow of coins from exchanges.
Yan Pritzker: (29:43)
So in other words, it's not people buying Bitcoin and then trying to trade it, it's them taking it off of the exchange and trying to store it for the longterm, which may change the nature of the market because people aren't necessarily trading it all the time. I mean, sure you have guys doing 100X leverage on Bitfinex, but most of the institutional interest is not in that. It's really just to take it and hold it for a long time. So it may change the nature of the market as more of that float is pulled off, we're glad to see.
Brett Messing: (30:09)
My experience with sort of what are called great trades is they never last. And so the great trade is, well, I buy the coin that they're having when the supply is reduced in half and I hold it 14 to 18 months and then I sell it. Maybe I even short it there. And then I repeat this. So it becomes like the Bitcoin Olympics. Every four years, I'm going to do this. And I've spoken to too many people who have that mindset. And if you go on Twitter, people are tracking where we going after the having.
Brett Messing: (30:38)
And it's my personal view that one of two things is going to happen. Either the bull market's going to end way earlier than people think, or it's just going to keep marching forward. So you're going to have these people who get off, regret as they watch it go off. And given that I'm wearing a Bitcoin hat, I'll let you guess which of those two outcomes I think is likely. But I would say the idea that this predictable trend continues, I would put it-
Yan Pritzker: (31:06)
I agree.
Brett Messing: (31:06)
A low percentage.
Yan Pritzker: (31:08)
I agree. I don't think it's going to be as predictable. And I know so many people who have gotten wreck trying to short tops thinking that it is the top of Bitcoin where it has no real top. And again, I would bring it back to the analogy of the internet where in 1995 you saw it like it had a dip in adoption around 1999 or 2000. And there was the dotcom bubble burst. And all of a sudden there was articles about people quitting their internet accounts or something like that. And if you would short the internet at that point that you would have been just destroyed.
Yan Pritzker: (31:35)
Absolutely wrecked, all your models are destroyed. It's the same thing with Bitcoin. If the truth here is that one an adoption curve and this is not a financial asset that goes up and down. No, it's an asset. It just hasn't yet been fully adopted. So it was just like shorting TCP/IP or the internet. I mean, you would be an absolute fool to do that or Amazon for that matter, if you try to short and long-term, you would be just destroyed.
Yan Pritzker: (31:56)
So it's the same problem here. We're in a place where the final state has not yet been achieved and may not be achieved for decades or longer. So you can try to trade those ups and downs. Good luck, but again, it's like trading ... Trying to short the internet. It's just not smart.
Brett Messing: (32:14)
So Yan what do you worry about? If we're wrong, you and I are having a beer, it's 10 years from now. And this seems like a ridiculous video that we made, me wearing a Bitcoin hat and you being bullish having built a business and we're just totally wrong. Why are we wrong?
Yan Pritzker: (32:35)
I think there's some things we don't know about maybe there's fatal flaw discovered in the technology or in the encryption that we just never thought about. Maybe somehow like the government just decides to just perpetually spend billions of dollars attacking the networks, never let it continue forward. And literally just decides to just continue to print money and to do so only for the case of stopping the Bitcoin network to move forward.
Yan Pritzker: (33:01)
I mean, these things could happen. They seem kind of outrageous but those could be probably the things that would make it really at least unusable in some medium term. But I mean, imagine that the US government just taking over the Bitcoin network and amassing all of the world's mining capacity and building factories just to out pace the rest of the world, just to make the thing stop. It seems ridiculous, but it can happen.
John Darsie: (33:24)
Elon's taking us to Mars Yan. We don't have to worry about regulation here on earth.
Yan Pritzker: (33:28)
Exactly, there you go. And we're going to need free money on Mars. We're going to need the money that is not controlled by the US government.
Brett Messing: (33:38)
I guess it's ... What I always say is I think regulatory is always risk number one. I mean, that's and then it's the unknowns. We're talking on Zoom, we're doing this SALT Talk because of the pandemic. Which is what Donald Rumsfeld said, "The unknown unknowns." Which is that's ... But it's far different. I spent most of my career trading energy where you worry about OPEC, you worry about war breaking out or peace breaking out or I mean regulation. There's just ... Bitcoin, I don't know. To your point, I don't worry about it that much but I-
Yan Pritzker: (34:12)
Sorry, go ahead.
Brett Messing: (34:15)
No, you go, please.
Yan Pritzker: (34:17)
I was going to say that I really like to look at Bitcoin's incentive structure and its underlying mechanics to think about what could probably go wrong. And what's interesting about Bitcoin is that has all this self-balancing behavior. The US decides to ban it. Probably we're going to take ourselves out of the mining industry. We're going to tell Peter Thiel to go home. We're going to tell everybody to stop mining, stop buying. Great, then what?
Yan Pritzker: (34:42)
Some other country, there's a vacuum, there's a power vacuum. This is a thing that is worth a lot of money. So it drops by 75%, it's still worth a lot and it starts to gain traction in other places. That country bans it. Somebody else steps in, I mean there's no real game theoretical scenario here where it just dies.
Yan Pritzker: (34:59)
You would have to kill it everywhere and kind of all at once. And it's a very difficult thing to do because it has so many different heads. And again, those heads, if you think about it, the places that would more likely ban it, I don't worry about the US banning it. The places that are more likely to ban it and where you've seen the bans are the places that actually have problems with their currency.
Yan Pritzker: (35:16)
Those are the same places that ban you from buying dollars. Those are the places that are really worried. And what happens in those places is that Bitcoin goes up in value and the people who end up holding it are able to pay bribes in the Bitcoin. They're able to buy off government officials in the Bitcoin. The local currency is worthless. And so you have this self pressuring cycle.
Yan Pritzker: (35:33)
So over time, it kind of self-regulate itself. It's really difficult for it to be killed in any one place and any attempt to kill it that fails only makes it stronger because it's just demonstrated Bitcoin's whole value proposition, which is it's money that can't be killed by governments. So as soon as we see those failures, value goes up, price goes up, adoption goes up, black markets go up, everything goes up. So it's very difficult for that reason. If you look at structurally how it works, and structurally what the incentives are for everybody in the system, it's very difficult to kill it for those reasons.
Brett Messing: (36:05)
It seems to me that as it gets broader ownership and both from the populace and corporate, it becomes unkillable. So maybe you could have killed it five years ago easily, you could have killed 10 years ago. Maybe you can still kill it, but if it continues on the rate it's at, I think it becomes like the Terminator. You can't stop it. I do worry a little bit right now.
Brett Messing: (36:32)
My history is I'm [inaudible 00:36:33] the democratic deputy mayor in Los Angeles, the progressive movement isn't cool with Bitcoin right now. And I think that's important just given what's going on in both the United States politically and globally that it's not seen as a libertarian right-wing idea.
Brett Messing: (36:53)
There was an unhelpful legislation introduced in Congress in the fall. It didn't go anywhere, but I think there's some educating to do. And just to making sure it doesn't ... Everything gets politicized. We don't want Bitcoin to become a partisan issue.
Yan Pritzker: (37:07)
I would agree there and look, my friends, I mean I probably have a circle of friends that's 95% liberal. So I know this better than anybody. And I don't know if I would consider myself a liberal or in the center or where, but I actually think that Bitcoin is very well aligned with liberal values in terms of helping the world and fixing the problems for other people and for society and all that, because it's just a matter of having them see the problem from a different perspective.
Yan Pritzker: (37:32)
And that what is for example liberals are very concerned about wealth inequality. Well, what's the problem. Should we just steal money from billionaires and give it to poor people, or is the actual problem that we're exacerbating wealth inequality because our money's unfair. And if you start to think of it that way, and start to sell the solutions well Bitcoin is a much fairer money than we've ever had because nobody can manipulate it. Nobody can print more of it. Nobody can issue handouts to somebody.
Yan Pritzker: (37:56)
If you're a bank, you can get bailout from the government. You're not going to get a Bitcoin bailout. That's just not going to work that way because nobody can print it. Is there an energy problem? Are we worried about not enough renewables, but guess what? Bitcoin helps balance green energy grids.
Yan Pritzker: (38:10)
It's a solution for many problems that liberals care about. And again, because of my circle of friends, I'm constantly talking about this stuff. I really do think that liberals will wake up to these things at some point when they realize what the truth is, but unfortunately a lot of people have their heads up certain bodily area that and they just don't think of outside of their own bubbles. So they're conditioned to think that the only solution to everything is government. And that's just I think the more you read about this stuff and think about it, it's just not.
Brett Messing: (38:40)
I think the Bitcoin is bad for the energy, is going to be something we hear a lot about this year. I don't think it's coincidence that Janet Yellen mentioned it this past week. Where does that go? That goes to, "Well, should you tax Bitcoin in some way?" Or a form of a Bitcoin carbon tax, if you will.
Brett Messing: (39:00)
I've always worried more about the government taxing Bitcoin in an unfriendly way than a ban. A ban just seems very severe. You can achieve a lot of what you might want to gain with tax policy.
Yan Pritzker: (39:14)
But I also think that we're going to start to see a shift around seeing Bitcoin as a national security issue and not having the government on any Bitcoin being a problem. I'm not saying this is gonna happen this year, but I do think in the next four years is going to start being viewed that way. Especially once we start seeing bigger countries settle trades between themselves as with Bitcoin.
Yan Pritzker: (39:34)
We're already seeing some of that with Iran and Venezuela and Turkey. So it's possible that as that happens, the government starts to change their tune a little bit. But I mean, yes, they could text Bitcoin mining and then what? Then we're just going to shift that entire industry to China. Is that what we want? Do we want to give our entire Bitcoin mining industry to China? That's not the narrative that has been played in America. China's now an enemy number one and we have to be better than them in every way.
Yan Pritzker: (39:59)
If we're going to voluntarily give up an entire industry, potentially an industry that's important to national security. I think we're going to do it wrong if we do that.
Brett Messing: (40:07)
All right. So I have one last question for you then I'll let John take us home. So one of the things that I have found so exciting about this stretch of institutional adoption is if you think about institutions as verticals, you've had corporations buying it, you've had endowments buying it. You've had a few pension funds, you've had a few mutual fund, almost every category has been filled, which is better than I think if we had lots and lots of corporate adoption, but nothing else in those various verticals. So to me, that's super encouraging. So my question to you is who's going to be the first country?
Yan Pritzker: (40:49)
I really do think it's going to be one of the disadvantaged countries. One of the countries has been pushed out of the dollar system. We have reports from Iran that they were forcing their miners to sell Bitcoin to the central bank. We have those reports already. I don't know if they're true. I'm not on the ground, but I'm assuming that the people who are know this.
Yan Pritzker: (41:07)
We know that Ukraine is about to mine Bitcoin in their nuclear facilities. This is being discussed. We know that Venezuela has these problems. Is going to be the countries that we don't like. It's going to be the countries that we're going to claim are terrorists and blah, blah, blah. But I feel really strongly that America has really abused its role in the world to say something like, "Oh, I ran is just like out of the dollar system because we don't like their leaders."
Yan Pritzker: (41:31)
We're punishing an entire country worth of people. They're fine people, they're normal people. They're people trying to live their lives and we're punishing them for their leaders. And those countries, they need to survive. And when there's necessity, necessity is the mother of invention. So it's exactly what we're going to see. We're going to see the "access of evil countries." The Irans and the Venezuela's of the world are going to be the first to adopt Bitcoin.
Yan Pritzker: (41:52)
Our government's going to react very negatively to it. We're going to try to do more censorship and more sanctions and all this. And we're going to find that it's totally ineffective and they're able to trade with each other just fine. And then we're going to look at the situation and say, "Well, guess what we just did? We created a monster." And we either play the game or we're out.
Brett Messing: (42:11)
So you're sort of predicting Silk Road two?
Yan Pritzker: (42:14)
I am predicting Silk Road Two on a national level. That's what it is. It's going to be that. It's going to be, Bitcoin's not for criminals, this for terrorists and it's for terrorist countries and it's for North Korea and Iran and stuff like that.
Brett Messing: (42:24)
It kind of present a marketing problem for Bitcoin. You know what I mean? On some level. I hadn't thought about this, this access we were going first. I had always thought it'll be an African country or Caribbean country or-
Yan Pritzker: (42:37)
It could be Nigeria. I mean Nigeria has a ton of Bitcoin adoption as well. Internally we know that something like 30% of Nigerians have claimed that they've used Bitcoin. And I know for people on the ground that it's very, very high adoption. People are building businesses down there. But I really do think because of the necessity to settle trades is where it comes down to.
Yan Pritzker: (42:56)
It's the necessity to settle trades when you can't use dollars or you can't use any currency of your neighbors because you don't trust them. It becomes a problem and I think that problem gets solved. But look, the Silk Road was a marketing problem for Bitcoin too. For people that don't know, it was 2013, it was a site for selling drugs and assassinations, and God knows what else. It was a huge problem for Bitcoin, but we need to pass that and all of a sudden we have Tesla buying it.
Yan Pritzker: (43:20)
So it's the same thing here where even if there's negative publicity in the first place, then it's the mind shift around yes, it's for criminals because money is for everybody just like the internet's also for criminals. And so are shoes and computers. Yes, these things are for criminals because they're for everybody. So once we get past that idea of is for criminals now, it's all of a sudden what are the actual benefits for that?
Brett Messing: (43:42)
So I'm going to let John speak. I just have one comment, I'm going to lose some Bitcoin cred. I actually read on vacation or spoke about Silk Road, Nick Hilton's book and it was fascinating and fun, but you won't see me wearing a free Ross t-shirt. I'm not saying you should stay in jail forever. I think the sentence was wrong, but we can spend a little time there. I think he's only been there five years. Anyway, so my Q-Rating just went down a little bit in the community.
Yan Pritzker: (44:15)
Nonviolent criminals should not be jailed. Come on.
Brett Messing: (44:16)
So true. We got a discussion on whether there was not-
Yan Pritzker: (44:21)
That's a separate discussion.
Brett Messing: (44:24)
No, I agree with that statement. I just don't know that it's that characterization, but yes, 100% agree with that. John, you want to finish us off?
John Darsie: (44:32)
Yeah. And my Q-Rating going to go down and Switzerland and in my home country, because you talk about criminal enterprise. I mean, most criminal enterprises take place with physical US dollar notes and run through the traditional banking system. So when you see banks attacking Bitcoin because a very small percentage of transactions are used for illicit activity. It rings a little bit hollow if you really understand how money laundering and criminal enterprise works.
Yan Pritzker: (44:58)
And I mean, they pay billions of dollars of fines and nobody talks about it as if it's a problem. It's just the status quo. We're just going to pay a couple of billion no problem, yeah we did some bad stuff. But with Bitcoin, all of a sudden it's like, "Oh no, one thing happened and now we have to talk about it now." It's just because it's new. It's the same thing. When the internet came out, it was the same stuff was said about the internet.
Yan Pritzker: (45:19)
It's going to be for criminals. There's all this nefarious activity online, there's child pornography and there's all this other stuff, look at all these problems. But the internet is a huge net benefit for humanity. I think pretty much everybody at this point would agree on that. Yes, it's used for illicit activity, just like anything else in life is. People are going to do illicit activity if you make things illegal.
John Darsie: (45:40)
So I want to talk about question. You referenced it very briefly. It's a common refrain from Bitcoin skeptics or Bitcoin haters that it uses this massive amount of energy. If we scale Bitcoin, it shows a basic lack of understanding about how Bitcoin works, but they talk about what if we scale the volume of transactions and the price. It's going to consume more energy than we consume on the entire planet.
John Darsie: (46:01)
What do people misunderstand about energy usage and how can we continue to develop energy solutions? You talked about Ukraine using nuclear power to mine Bitcoin, but how can we sort of re build our energy grid in a way that's friendlier for all purposes, but including within the context of Bitcoin?
Yan Pritzker: (46:20)
I think one thing just to address is how Bitcoin actually does scale or how the energy usage is ... What it's proportional to. It's very different mentally from what you might think of. It's not a per transaction usage cost, which a lot of people get wrong. And then project it outwards to say Bitcoin's going to eat the world's energy. And this was written in 2017. It was an article that said by 2020 Bitcoin will use all the energy output of the world. Well, guess what? It didn't do that and the price went up quite a lot.
Yan Pritzker: (46:44)
So what actually happens in Bitcoin is that Bitcoin uses energy proportional to the value of the coin. So if it's $50,000 per Bitcoin, then it costs almost $50,000 worth of energy to produce that Bitcoin. It's just proportional because as the price goes up, more miners come in to want to try to mine it. And Bitcoin actually self adjusts to always be exactly the same amount of difficulty to mine. So if more miners come in, it becomes more difficult so that we can only produce a certain amount of Bitcoin per time period.
Yan Pritzker: (47:15)
So Bitcoin's energy use does not scale with more transactions. It only really scales with the price, but even then as the price goes up and like I said if you Ukraine starts mining in a nuclear power plant, and all of a sudden they're able to mine more than anybody else, then only other nuclear power plants will be able to present the pain of mining.
Yan Pritzker: (47:32)
That's what actually comes down to is that everybody's has to get leveled up in their ability. And this is why I really believe that over time Bitcoin mining will be very strongly co-located with energy companies. You have to be at the source of production. You have to be right by that windmill or by the hydro station or wherever you're producing your Bitcoin.
Yan Pritzker: (47:49)
Because outside of that, you're going to have higher energy costs. And whenever you have higher energy costs, you're now become uncompetitive in the market. Bitcoin has an effect to push out anybody who is not on the absolute cheapest Bitcoin energy production costs. So that's number one is Bitcoin's energy usage is not specific to transactions. We can have a million transactions, and by the way, a Bitcoin transaction is not a person to person payment. This is really another thing people don't understand.
Yan Pritzker: (48:17)
A Bitcoin transaction could be settling thousands of payments. It could be a batch of millions of payments that came from a second layer, like a lightning network, or even from you using your Visa credit card and then paying the bill on Bitcoin. That could be millions of transactions bashed into one Bitcoin transaction. So a Bitcoin transaction is more like a container ship that you send over the ocean containing all this cargo. And you don't talk about it as like it didn't cost you $1 million to ship a piece of plastic from China, is because all this plastic was inside of that container.
Yan Pritzker: (48:45)
So Bitcoin is a very much a settlement network. It's more like fed wire. There's a great article by Nick Carter that came out in CoinDesk if you guys want to more about that, where he makes that analogy and really drives it home. So Bitcoin doesn't scale with ... Its energy usage does not scale the transactions. In fact, that's not a problem at all.
Yan Pritzker: (49:04)
But the second thing to flip the energy narrative on its head is that a lot of these green power plants like Texas, they have wind energy. In order for them to be economical, they have to be built of a certain size and they can't be built of a certain size if there's not that demand for that energy.
Yan Pritzker: (49:19)
So what Bitcoin does is it comes in and it's the buyer of last resort for any energies that's unused. So rather than wasting energy, Bitcoin is actually reclaiming waste energy. It's reclaiming energy that would otherwise not be used by anybody. And it's creating a price for that power plant to be operational, to be profitable and to invest in continuous innovation.
Yan Pritzker: (49:38)
So if we want green energy, we need Bitcoin at every green power plant creating that load so they can actually continue to expand, innovate and develop better solutions. Bitcoin is very unique in that way, because it can be turned on and off. If you want to learn more about that, there's an article I think it's in Forbes.
Yan Pritzker: (49:54)
If you Google about [Orchard 00:49:56] and how they're using Bitcoin with the company called Layer1, they're acting as a dynamic load on that a system where they can be turned on and off in order to balance the grid, which is really, really cool. It really is the key to more renewable development.
John Darsie: (50:10)
We just have a couple of minutes left. So I'm going to do some rapid fire questions where I'll be looking for rapid fire answer. So Bitfinex and Tether just settled with the New York attorney general for 18 and a half million bucks. No admission of wrongdoing. No insinuation that they've been using Tether to manipulate and boost the price of Bitcoin.
John Darsie: (50:30)
Is that issue settled now with Tether? Is all the fear, uncertainty and doubt related to Tether dead, or still that an open issue about whether there's other issues within Tether?
Yan Pritzker: (50:39)
It's probably going to be a perennial issue just because people love to come up with something to criticize. Frankly, we here at Swan. I mean, we sell millions of dollars of Bitcoin and we've never touched Tether. I think if you talk to anybody who actually operates an exchange, they could tell you how much of that is Tether affecting prices. People don't look at OTC markets where Tether may not be used.
Yan Pritzker: (50:57)
I mean, there's a host of issues. This is already been debunked in it. Honestly, I don't think it's going away. People are going to keep going at it, but it doesn't really matter because you could see the price of Bitcoin is just fine.
John Darsie: (51:07)
All right. So next question. We recently had the launch of the first North American Bitcoin ETF in Canada. Purpose Investments was the first, or there was another that came soon after, but Purpose did $400 million of volume in its first two days of trading, despite the fact that the ETF market in Canada is a small fraction. I think it's around 200 plus billion versus 5 trillion in the US. What does that tell you about what it's going to look like when a US ETF comes out and what's your prediction for the timeline for a US ETF?
Yan Pritzker: (51:37)
I think it has to happen very soon and the reason for that is that you have all these proxy stocks that people are buying because they want Bitcoin exposure. They're buying MicroStrategy, they're buying Tesla, the stock is going vertical. It's frankly, irresponsible of SEC not to approve an ETF because what they're doing is they're just creating bubbles and stocks that talk about Bitcoin in any way. So I think it's going to happen very soon and now we have to do it to save face because you can't let Canada win. Come on guys.
John Darsie: (51:59)
Exactly. All right. This was fantastic. Really enjoyed this conversation. Brett, do you have any final words for Yan before we let him go?
Brett Messing: (52:06)
No, just thank you, Yan. And again, we're really grateful that you wrote the book and if you write another book, we'll be at the front of the line.
Yan Pritzker: (52:15)
Awesome.
Brett Messing: (52:16)
And we will continue buying and distributing them because as I said, it's the best one-on-one book I've read.
Yan Pritzker: (52:23)
I appreciate that so much. Thank you guys for taking the time and for having me on. I really appreciate it.
John Darsie: (52:27)
Yep. And again, that's Inventing Bitcoin by Yan Pritzker. It's a relatively quick read. You can get it straight on Amazon but it's a great place to start in terms of understanding the technology and Vijay Boyapati as we've mentioned, the Bullish Case for Bitcoin. You put those two resources together, you're on the path to becoming a Bitcoin maximalist the way Brett and the way Yan is. But thank you everybody for tuning into today's SALT Talk.
John Darsie: (52:50)
We love educating people about digital assets, is something that we've been on a journey over the last several years to learn about it and get comfortable with the custody and the security and other issues that people bring up when they express skepticism about Bitcoin. But just a reminder, we have all these episodes of SALT Talks focusing on digital assets on our website, salt.org\talks. You can go there and view them all on demand, and you can view them all on our YouTube channel as well, which is called SALT Tube.
John Darsie: (53:17)
We're on Twitter, which is where we're most active on social media @saltconference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, and we're trying to grow our presence there. So we'd appreciate a follow and please spread the word about SALT Talks and about these digital assets SALT Talks. Again, even if people aren't going to be buying Bitcoin, we think it's important to educate yourself about it so you can sort of get over some of these common criticisms whether it be related to energy or other items that people frequently bring up. But on behalf of the entire SALT team and Brett, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT Talks for today. We hope to see you back here soon.