The video elaborates on Bitcoin's potential to significantly disrupt traditional financial and institutional structures, comparing its impact to that of the historical invention of the Gutenberg printing press. It presents Bitcoin as a modern innovation capable of transforming the current economic landscape by offering a decentralized alternative to centralized monetary systems. By allowing individuals property rights over assets without central bank intervention, Bitcoin is positioned as "Gold 2.0," a modern, digital store of value independent of governmental control.

Furthermore, the video explores the socio-economic implications of Bitcoin and related technologies in addressing current economic disparities. It highlights the education and wealth gaps plaguing countries like the United States, where a significant portion of the population holds no investible assets and remains financially uneducated. Bitcoin is seen as a potential tool for enhancing financial inclusivity and literacy, particularly in regions facing economic upheaval and currency instability.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. disruptive [dɪsˈrʌptɪv] - (adjective) - Causing significant change or interruption to an established process, system, or environment. - Synonyms: (unsettling, revolutionary, groundbreaking)

Bitcoin is an innovation as significant as the Gutenberg printing press, actually. And I think the implications of its emergence will be similarly disruptive to institutions in the world.

2. imputed [ɪmˈpjuːtɪd] - (adjective) - Attributed to or ascribed to something naturally or logically. - Synonyms: (assigned, credited, ascribed)

So all the rest of it is imputed. Where, Lena, you and I have decided that it's worth 1300 an ounce.

3. monopoly [məˈnɑːpəli] - (noun) - Exclusive control or possession of something, especially a market or particular supply. - Synonyms: (dominance, control, exclusivity)

When you give one organization legal monopoly privileges, which is what the central bank is to now monopolize money and control its issuance.

4. cognitive [ˈkɒɡnɪtɪv] - (adjective) - Relating to cognition, the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. - Synonyms: (intellectual, mental, psychological)

It's something that's deeply embedded in our cognitive machinery.

5. debasement [dɪˈbeɪsmənt] - (noun) - The act of reducing the quality or value of something, particularly currency. - Synonyms: (devaluation, deterioration, degradation)

If you think back, you know, I'm 33, you're in your forties... Before 1971, there was nowhere near the debasement of the currency that there is today.

6. extrapolated [ɪkˈstræpəˌleɪtɪd] - (verb) - Inferred or extended information to an unknown situation by assuming that present trends will continue or similar methods will be applicable. - Synonyms: (inferred, deduced, projected)

And I always go back, and I think this generational idea is really can be extrapolated even further.

7. enforcer [ɪnˈfɔːrsər] - (noun) - A person or thing that compels compliance with laws, rules, or obligations. - Synonyms: (overseer, upholder, implementer)

Now for money, the most important property, you don't need that enforcer anymore.

8. proliferation [prəˌlɪfəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Rapid increase or spread of something. - Synonyms: (expansion, growth, spread)

...This led to the rapid proliferation and dissemination of literacy.

9. censorship-resistant [ˈsɛnsərʃɪp rɪˈzɪstənt] - (adjective) - Not easily restricted by suppressing or prohibiting certain content or communication. - Synonyms: (unrestricted, unmodifiable, unsuppressible)

...And has censorship resistant payments, and it has sovereignty for those that hold it, that seems pretty valuable.

10. fork war [fɔːrk wɔːr] - (noun) - A dispute or conflict within a software community over diverging developments of a technology, leading to a split into separate versions. - Synonyms: (division, schism, split)

...It's undergone a fork war.

This Video Will Leave You SPEECHLESS - Eye Opening Video on Bitcoin

Bitcoin is an innovation as significant as the Gutenberg printing press, actually. And I think the implications of its emergence will be similarly disruptive to institutions in the world. Bitcoin and things like it is the equivalent of the red pill. Okay? We are entering a completely world of uncharted water.

Have you made any investments in bitcoin? So, I mean, I personally, I own bitcoin in my hedge fund. I own bitcoin in my fund. I own bitcoin in my private account. It is a huge deal. It's a huge, huge, huge deal. Because what you're talking about right now is for the next three to five years, an unbelievably better store value. It is gold 2.0, right? The value of gold that hedges the world economy about $9 trillion, right? 1300 an ounce, of which only $100 to $150 is the actual production value. So all the rest of it is imputed. Where, Lena, you and I have decided that it's worth 1300 an ounce. Well, guess what? I can do the same thing with bitcoin, except now I could do it outside the purview of every single government basis of civilization is that relationship between the owner and their asset, which we call property.

Money is just a reflection of the wealth in the world, right? The property that we have created through this capitalistic process. When you give one organization, this is all based on free market dynamics. But when you give one organization legal monopoly privileges, which is what the central bank is to now monopolize money and control its issuance, they have a mechanism to violate the property rights of all other economic actors that are using dollars, that are denominating assets in dollars. So this is something that's so fundamental that it contradicts the premise of self ownership. When we give power away to a single institution that can arbitrarily, at a political whim, choose to violate the relationships of all economic actors using that money.

One of the easiest ways I find to talk about bitcoin is just talking about the legacy problems and kind of what the average person does, and both from those that are successful and those also that are not successful. And so let's start with some statistics around just the United States, right? 45% of Americans hold no investable assets. That's so crazy. So it is an investible asset for people that don't know what that means. A stock, a bond, cryptocurrency, real estate, all the things that are basically are not cash that you're buying because you think that they're going to appreciate in the future. And so, really, that 45% of folks are living paycheck to paycheck. They keep all of their wealth stored in dollars in a bank account. They tend to be, you know, obviously not very well financially off, but also on top of that, they tend to actually not be nearly as educated about how the system works. So there's a wealth inequality gap, but there's also a very large education gap.

It's being used everywhere where you would think it would be used. Russia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Venezuela, Argentina, everywhere where you have currency pressure, everywhere where you want to basically shield your assets. And then after that, it'll probably become a payment mechanism. So in all of these three industries, you're talking about trillions of dollars up for grabs. Up for grabs, right. And it's just about trying something and taking a few months to understand what the opportunity is and then hit the scene. And I think that the cool thing is it's easier to know how to code. It's actually useful in a way where, you know, you can probably hack something together yourself. You can find folks. And so this is the time where people should be trying really big, crazy things.

You can think that bitcoin is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if you don't actually buy any bitcoin, then you can't take advantage of the growth. Also a psychotechnology. It's like literacy or numeracy. It's a software implementation we put into our brain. We use it to communicate, negotiate, plan. I mean, how many times a day do you think in dollars? It's something that's deeply embedded in our cognitive machinery. And that gets into my argument later about why central banking is kind of a computer virus on the human brain. But I think what would be an appropriate avenue here is to think, okay, you've been pursuing dollars your whole life. What you're actually pursuing is what those dollars can get you. That's what money is, right? Money is the most exchangeable good. You can think of it as a call option on anything the market can produce. So any good, any service, any knowledge, human time, anything people can do, any service anyone can render for you, money is a call option on that. And that's why it's the most valuable or apex good in a marketplace.

So what it ultimately means is that money is the most important form of property. So what we're all really, after, all of our businesses, our lifestyles, our governments, these are property strategies, if you will. These are ways to reach consensus on property, to distribute property in an equitable way, in a way that we all determine to be fair, right? Fair and equitable.

I mean, think about if I told you to go play a game, and I said, but I'm not going to tell you the rules, right? Be pretty hard to play the game at first, at least. Maybe you figure it out, maybe you don't, but you're obviously going to be much better equipped to play the game if I explain to you how the game works and what the rules are. And so if you think of money or finances as a game, there's really one key rule that everyone has to understand, which is the dollars will be worth less in purchasing power terms over a long period of time. That's not a negative towards the dollar, that's not a positive towards the dollar. It's just that is a fact. And we call it inflation.

Yeah. And the system is built that way. And the economic argument for why it is built that way is because if I know that my dollars are going to lose purchasing power, meaning that today it costs me $2 to buy a loaf of bread, in five years, it'll cost me $4 to buy a loaf of bread, I'm financially incentivized to either invest the money or to spend the money. But holding it is a losing proposition. Now, that economic theory is predicated on the fact that everyone knows the dollars are going to lose value, because what ends up happening is those 45% of Americans end up not investing the money or really spending the money. They're trying to save the money, but it is losing value.

And I always go back, and I think this generational idea is really can be extrapolated even further. It's not just folks on the inner city. If you think back, you know, I'm 33, you're in your forties. If we go to our parents or our grandparents, for the most part, their financial advice was save, right? Spend less than you make. If you save, then you can make your way to financial security. That was actually true specifically around our grandparents generation, a little bit for our parents, and then for us, not so much. And so the advice that was passed down was actually predicated on a situation that no longer exists. Because before 1971, there was nowhere near the debasement of the currency that there is today.

Five properties of money and one, gold, was selected. The idea that that's being disrupted by this 13 year old digital upstart is pretty, pretty wild. But I think that bitcoin is an innovation as significant as the Gutenberg printing press, actually. And I think the implications of its emergence will be similarly disruptive. To institutions in the world.

You know, this is late in the 15th century, I believe, when the printing press was invented. The 500 years prior to that, there had been roughly 10 million books printed. All of a sudden, this super cheap, an efficient way of reproducing books was invented. The Gutenberg printing press, which was a composite of other inventions. By the way, it wasn't really a breakthrough in itself. It was one guy or guys put together four or five different other inventions and made this thing work. Similar to bitcoin, actually, that's what Satoshi did. He pulled together things that already existed, but just put them together in a radically new package that we call bitcoin.

Ten years after the invention of the printing press, 10 million books were produced. So the amount of books produced in ten years equaled the amount produced in the 500 years prior. What did this do? This led to the rapid proliferation and dissemination of literacy. Numeracy, again, psychotechnologies, right? These modes of systemizing our cognition that actually increase our ability to cooperate, absent or independent of institutions of the day, which. The dominant institution of the day was the church.

They owned a monopoly on knowledge, effectively via the scriptoria, which is where scriptorium, I may be saying that you can make it up. I have no fucking idea. I've never heard that word before. They used to have monks copying books by hand, right? So to produce one book took a lot of labor. Books were a luxury item.

All of a sudden, due to this innovation called the printing press, the cost of book production plummeted. Books become much more widely dispersed. And the church at first didn't realize this existential threat. Once it did, it actually tried to clamp down on the printing press, which created an interesting dynamic that we actually started producing books on how to produce the printing press.

So it saw that this is a good allegory. I think that when the institution tries to grab, tries to clamp down on the disruptive technology, the subversive technology, let's say it actually drives it to its highest and most useful form of subversion, actually.

So the result of that was a lot more thinkers, a lot higher quality of thinking, variety of thinking. And in general, it created a market for heresy, right? This led to Martin Luther pinning that, like, why do we need you? Individuals can now have this independent relationship with the word of God because they've developed literacy and whatnot. They don't need to go through this middleman of the church. And the printing press effectively led to the dissolution of the church as the dominant institution in the world. So we had separation of church and state and all the, the benefits that that created in the aftermath.

I think encryption technology, and this is deriving a lot of this from the book. The sovereign individual, which I've recommended highly, is similar, that it actually disrupts functions of the government that we needed the government previously for. We can now provide a, with code, bitcoin being an obvious one. Right. We needed the physical enforcer for property historically. Now for money, the most important property, you don't need that enforcer anymore.

So I think that bitcoin, its emergence will actually lead to the dissolution of the nation state as the dominant organizational model for human beings. But as a market observer, hell yeah, that's valuable, right? There's a ton of people who want to play this. There's a ton of people who are running into it, and so do I know if the price go up or down or whatever, all of that is almost secondary.

And frankly, I don't think anyone can predict as much as being able to observe the fact that I don't know. I think the GitHub repository of loot in general was one of the most positive or was one of the most popular GitHub repositories last week. So crazy on the entire Internet, does that mean that it's going to be worth tons of money? No.

Is that a pretty good data point? There's a lot of developer activity, yeah. Right. Are there a lot of people who are talking about it online? If you go search on, you know, Twitter, in the tech community, whole lot of people talking about it again.

Well, we've seen things tons of people talked about and ended up going to zero. Right. There's no, no one data point is the predictor. But I think if you sit in the market observer seat and constantly remind yourself, I do not know the future, but I am willing to observe what's happening right now. You start to understand that there's corners of the Internet that think weird things are valuable.

And so if you can get out of the game of, I see these things, right? And I think I'm like, that is weird. Why would somebody buy words on a black screen? I wouldn't buy it. Right. So nobody must want to buy it. Well, no, I'm an idiot if I think that, right? Because what ends up happening is as an observer, you have the humility to understand there's millions and millions and millions of people on the Internet that want to do stuff I don't want to do.

Okay, so you can choose to invest or not invest, whatever, but being aware of and observing what's happening, I think is really important. And whether it's nfts, whether it's games, whether it's something else, you start to just wrap your head around and say, man, this technology is creating two separate revolutions.

One is a monetary revolution, which is bitcoin. What we've talked about in terms of the fact that nobody can debase this currency, anyone has access to it and has censorship resistant payments, and it has sovereignty for those that hold it, that seems pretty valuable.

Trillion dollar market cap today. How big can it get? I don't know, but I think it'd be bigger ten years from now than it is today. Okay, I probably want to own some of that, right? That's my personal decision. The second revolution is this idea of kind of the digital realm or the automation that comes with all of this.

And when you start to think about this, you say to yourself, man, there's a lot of people who seem to want to do this. Even if I think it's completely stupid, even if I think that it's literally the worst idea in the world. How do you argue with the market?

And so I think that, you know, there's folks who choose from, like, a maximalist standpoint to focus only on bitcoin. And frankly, that's where I tend to spend most of my time, because the monetary revolution is much more intellectually stimulating for me. Right? I'm intrigued by it. It's things I sit and think about all day and spend time on.

But I got plenty of friends who think that's the dumbest thing in the world. They're like, dude, who cares, right? Like, look at this and pick your kind of other area to focus on. And so I think that it's really easy online to, like, get caught up a lot in this idea of one revolution is important and one's not, or vice versa.

At the end of the day, it's, well, who's asking the question? And what we're watching here is every industry is going to be impacted by this technology. Bitcoin is the only asset that has truly, credibly exhibited the qualities of decentralization. It's undergone a fork war. People have tried to increase the block size, change the supply, all these things. And bitcoin is kind of tried and true. It's battle tested. So with nfts, I would just say, and crypto, more generally, nfts and crypto, I don't think decentralization has been achieved anywhere else. So I'll just leave it at that. Just so people that is the key difference is that bitcoin is the one asset in the world that no one can control.

Innovation, Technology, Economics, Disruption, Cryptocurrency, Decentralization, Business Motiversity