The Rise of Bitcoin and Digital Capital

Well, you know, Scott, when in 2020, I was very frustrated and a bit depressed.

I don't think I was alone.

A lot of people were frustrated and depressed during that time period.

And I was, you know, my company was worth 600 million

enterprise value and I'd worked 30 years and I could not

break through against the Microsoft,

you know, you know, juggernaut and I couldn't figure out how to grow it.

And after 10 years of trying,

I figured maybe I should just retire and go

gracefully off and just call it a day.

And I think, as I said, I discovered Bitcoin out of frustration and desperation.

And first it was just something to do.

And then I realized it was a good technology.

I went from I'll buy it because I don't have a choice to do anything else to

I'm an investor.

And I started thinking Bitcoin is like Facebook for money, or it's like it's

like a dominant digital monetary network.

And I started becoming a tech believer in it.

But then I emerged as a maximalist, Scott, which is, you know,

you wrote your book about

the four. And at the end of the book, you know, you basically are a little

bit jaded. You're like, these guys got too much power

and they abused their power and the world's not a better place for that. That's

because they're companies.

And if Bitcoin was a company, if it was a big digital banking network,

it probably also gets corrupted.

What I realized is Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol.

It's a commodity.

It's ethically superior to a company.

It's ethically superior to these big tech companies because it represents

a protocol of economic empowerment for eight billion people and everybody on Earth,

regardless of your views.

And so I basically went from opportunist to investor to maximalist.

And now I'm of the opinion that.

The human race moves forward through clean energy,

clean food, clean money, and and human misery was our water was dirty.

Our food was dirty. We didn't have energy. We had dirty clothes.

We had doctors with dirty hands and dirty instruments and the like.

And we had dirty money.

And for the last five hundred thousand years, all of our economics have been

broken and their human misery has

taken place because copper tokens and giant stone coins and glass beads and silver

coins and gold,

none of these things were perfect capital assets.

They were never they were never a settlement network and and they

were never a non deflationary asset.

Bitcoin represents clean money.

It represents economic energy and economic empowerment.

So my mission at this point

is I would just like to spread it to eight billion people.

I actually think you can Bitcoin is hope.

I think you can fix a company, fix a country,

fix a family. It won't solve the other problems.

It doesn't cure cancer and it doesn't make

you a good basketball player and it doesn't it doesn't, you know,

resolve political differences and religious differences. I'm not I get that.

What it does is it gives people a working economic fluid that doesn't

drain 10 percent of their economic energy per year out, you know, out the back door.

And so I'm a big advocate for digital capital in the

same way that 150 years ago,

maybe I could get really excited about spreading electricity to the world.

But I'm you know, if you found fire,

you would want people to know about fire.

And you know, Henry Ford, as I said,

he put he put the fire in an engine and he gave us wings. He let us fly.

And and so the

world's a better place with the automobile or the plane or aluminum or steel or

computers or A I. or whatever it is.

I just think the world's a better place with digital capital or our clean store

of value money.

You could say it's a a fair and equitable

way for us to settle our differences.

And there's something nice about that.