YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Weiss

lines on the record: 80
first: 2022-04-20
most recent: 2022-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It really is. You get a little bit of an example of that. He just did this podcast with Lex Freeman, so that's worth, it's like four hours long, and he goes into some other very interesting areas where you just kind of like, how do you know?”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you now know, what you see on the podcast is truly what you get. There's no act, there's no different version of in person when the two of us are hanging out alone talking. It's the same as we're doing. The whole world gets”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we offer weekly liquidity because fidelity is closed on weekends and certain hours, but really it's pretty much daily. You went out today, we'll get you out today.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll get a wallet, we'll get a wallet address, and we'll send them the amount of Bitcoin that they're entitled to so they can actually take possession of their Bitcoin, which was the single most important factor in starting the fund for me. I think that even if you don't hold your own Bitcoin, you need to be able to.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we set up a fund to try to accommodate those folks and then give them some of the benefits that they may not even know that they want. So I have a fund called Bitcoin Investment Group. It's more of a labor of love for the community than a profit center. I don't make any money on it. We charge 1% a year. We custody the Bitcoin at Fidelity Digital Assets, which I think is probably the safest custodian in the world. And basically it's just a buy and hold. There's no trading. There's nothing like that. We maintain kind of separate tax lots so that nobody in the fund is impacted by anybody else's buying or selling of their Bitcoin. And then the really cool part is if someone wants to redeem and leave the fund, they have the choice to go back into US dollars or won't sell Bitcoin and give them money if they feel like making that mistake. Or we will wire them, send them, wire them. That's so funny.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to feel like other investments they've done in their life. When they come to the conclusion that, hey, yeah, I like some exposure to this. I want to own some of this. They don't want to go to a firm they've never heard of, even if it's a Coinbase, right? They don't want a new password. They don't want a wallet. They sure don't want a hardware wallet. They don't want passphrase, right? This is just 65-year-old guy worth $50 million doesn't want this. He just wants to buy a million dollars worth of Bitcoin.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generally speaking, a new client starts the conversation with some version of my daughter, my son, my granddaughter, you know, someone has been telling them about Bitcoin for some time. They've dismissed it for a period of time because it wasn't in their purview, right? It wasn't in their world. It wasn't on their TV shows, their newspapers. And now it is. Now they turn on CNBC, and they're talking about this. They coin stuff. They open the Wall Street Journal. They're talking about Bitcoin. They look at the cover of Forbes, you know, like all of this. So now they're saying, my kid was right and I got to learn about this. I don't want to be an idiot. I know a little bit. Help me learn a little more. And then the coiners hate this, but the truth of the matter is they're not interested right now in the, not your keys, not your coin.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Property rights are about the most well established rights out there. So getting a designation of property is quite a comfort. And then there's also close ties to property rights and taxation. There's a lot of history and it's tough to, for example, we're not taxing New York City real estate on an unrealized capital gain basis, right? It's property. So a designation of property might be very useful if the government starts to get scared that Bitcoin's growing too big and they wanted to institute an unrealized capital gain tax. I was like, wait a minute, we're property here.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So there are a lot of aspects of property that are beneficial to us as Bitcoiners, right? For one thing, a politician can't advocate for security. So you couldn't have a Cynthia Lummis in the Senate saying buy Apple stock. But she can advocate for property. That's important, right? From a advocacy political point of view, that Bitcoin be viewed as property. And then the other thing that's really important about property is property rights globally are pretty well established. You know, nation states can violate them and they have eminent domain, kind of other stuff. But generally speaking,”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean We have to remember that the SEC is a government agency, and there are no shortage of counterintuitive and counterproductive measures that governments take. So I think it's nice that we have someone in the top spot who admires Bitcoin and respects its contribution. And I think that we're in really good position to be viewed as property. Which is the most important thing, in my opinion. And so I think this confluence of people and events and regulatory evolution is better than I would have expected, could have imagined. That said, it is surprising to me that the price of Bitcoin and US dollars is still as low as it is. If you would have told me these events would have happened, I would have thought the price would be significantly more than it is now.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we can improve the other ETF, which makes no sense. But anyway, so that's what I think is behind that. Although the grayscale thing will be interesting because there are other forces that play there, right? And if Gensler really is pro-Bitcoin and a Bitcoin maxi, which he may well be, then he might be looking for an opportunity to approve an ETF. And in Grayscale's case with GBTC, you've got lots of investors who are suffering because the value is not anywhere near NAV, right? So he could use that protecting those investors as kind of a rationale for granting them a special situation, you know, conversion into an ETF. And they also, the SEC solicited comments from shareholders of GBTC. And there's an overwhelming response. It could be that those responses are just kind of like fodder and support for him saying,”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think the rationale, if you read the language when they rejected the other Bitcoin ETS, I think the language suggests that he wants to use this Bitcoin ETF as leverage to go after the exchanges. And the exchanges are kind of a one-throat to choke kind of thing for all those other thousands of digital assets. So if he can rate force the exchanges to be regulated and compliant, then the exchanges They're the ones that will have the burden of making the individual assets be compliant before they can trade them. So I think that's his tact. And he kind of, the SEC kind of gave an excuse when they rejected the ETFs like, well, we can't be sure that the exchanges, you know, the exchanges that the Bitcoin trades on are not compliant. And therefore, we can't be sure that the price isn't manipulated, so we can't approve the spot ETF.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, way more Way more, yeah. So I think I think my take on that is his job is very challenging, right? Bitcoin is not a pain point for him. It's the 15,000 other digital assets that I think he perceives and maybe rightly so as securities. And he's got this very unwieldy task of how does he regulate, how does he bring these other things that are securities like, you know, into compliance. And it's virtually impossible. They can't even, you know, they're having trouble winning their case against Ripple, which it seems like they've got a pretty good case. Yeah, so if you can't slam that one, right? How are you going to do all the others?”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people like to say for a long time that it doesn't matter what the governments do or say they can't hurt it, blah, blah, blah. You know, the truth of the matter is if the United States had not taken such an incredibly pragmatic approach to regulating Bitcoin, it would be a very different landscape. And so we were very fortunate to get the Biden administration. We were fortunate that Gensler, who's one of the more knowledgeable people on the planet about digital assets, cryptocurrencies, et cetera, is the chairman of the SEC. We're fortunate that Gensler helped put other people in the Biden administration in place. And if you've watched the class that Gensler taught for MIT on Bitcoin and crypto, you can't help but come away with the impression that the guy, I don't know if he's a Bitcoin Maxi, but he certainly likes Bitcoin. He admires Satoshi a number of times. He said, you know, that the contract.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not even close. There wasn't even a catalyst to envision how this would catch fire. So otherwise, people wouldn't have those stories about buying pizzas or using a thousand Bitcoin to buy an iPhone, you know, like really it was just impossible to understand that it could really not impossible obviously white paper everything people envisioned it. But the pragmatic actual acceptance of it would have been hard to envision. At least I wasn't capable of envisioning it at that time. But now I think we're in a really unique situation where on a risk adjusted basis, like literally right now as we sit here today, I think this is by far the most attractive Bitcoin it's ever been.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, in 2013, Bitcoin was a hope and a dream. Who knows if this is going to get any traction? Who knows if it's going to be regulated away? There are real risks. I mean, it's just now that we're finding out that the government's not so opposed to it, right? Here in the US, and we've had other governments outlawed, all of that was like massive risks. So back then it was kind of like there was not any real network effect. There wasn't any traction. There were all these geopolitical risks. It was just”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, I think my first trade was in like 700 or something. And I think I sold at like probably double that. But on a risk adjusted basis, I actually think Bitcoin is a much better investment today than it was then. For sure. Talk about that.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take Bitcoin. That still wouldn't be a good business, right? You know, I was like, you know, and then I thought about it and I said, well, if this is going to work out due to the limited supply, the price of Bitcoin is going to have to go up. So I said, well, I'll just buy some Bitcoin and move on to the next thing, right? And then it was super volatile. It was kind of a passion buy. There was no reason to believe that Bitcoin would be where it is today. I was up a lot. I was down a lot. And then finally, I just sold it a profit thinking, I don't know what I'm doing.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to see what it was about. And I was really blown away. I don't know that I would have articulated it this way at the time, but being an internet VEC, you kind of got good at seeing what was a good application of the internet and what wasn't. And what the internet was really good for was sharing information quickly all over the world, not particularly secure. And when I went to this Bitcoin conference, it was the first time that I saw the internet being used to transmit value safely and securely and more amazing Partier didn't have to know or trust Party B and you didn't need a third party intermediary. And so Lightbulb went off. I was like, this is it. This is the thing. And I racked my, I was like, I got to do something in this space. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I got to do something. And I was like, what kind of business can I start here? That was my first thing. And the only business idea that I could come up with was, I guess I could start a directory of companies that”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I figured I needed a pivot point, so I went to a business school at Columbia. And then after that got into venture capital and private equity, and I was investing, I went to G capital first. And at the time, BC wasn't like it is now. There were only 4,500 people in the United States of Venture Capital. It was kind of a small cottage industry. And GE Capital at the time was the largest VC investor putting out about a billion dollars a year. And so I joined them. They had a training program, learned a lot, and then I moved on to a couple of other VC firms, but I was always investing in companies that were using the internet. So it was kind of internet-based VC. This was 98, 99 kind of time frame. And so then I joined, we invested in a company called Internet Capital Group, ICG. I joined them, and then I helped start a firm in New York called Stripes Group after that. And then I went to a Bitcoin conference in Miami in 2000.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I lost a lot of friends that day. I probably knew about 30 people that were there. Yeah, it sucked I was a bond trader. I traded two years in of U.S. treasuries and agency bonds. And I loved it. It was kind of a great macroeconomic kind of thing. Able to be a professional athlete. You know, I didn't have the skills for that, but it had like the same adrenaline rush and the instant feedback of winning and losing and monetary rewards for winning and losing. So that was cool. I loved it, but I looked around the trading floor and there was like nobody in their 40s there. So I was like, okay, I better find a new career. And trading doesn't really give you that many transferable skills”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to undergrad at the University of Maryland College Park, and my first job out of school was in the Two World Trade Center on the 60th floor, Dean Witter, and I would have been there 9-11 had I not gone back to Columbia Business School, so fortuitous.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And blaming it on Putin or supply chains or built up demand or this other stuff or governor of Texas slowing trucks at the border, it's just silliness. We did it to ourselves.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But an example, I think, that really kind of drives it home. I mean, my mom's in her 70s. This example was effective for my mom, right? And so I'm here in Miami. And I said, you know, if you went to sleep, if you put a dome over the city of Miami, okay, nothing in, nothing out. And then while everybody was asleep, you doubled the money. So everybody that had a dollar, it was $2 the next day. There was a thousand bucks in your bank account. It was $2,000. When you went to your favorite store or favorite restaurant or whatever place it was the next day, right? The price of that thing that you bought for a dollar yesterday before they doubled the money supply would be somewhere between $1 and $2, right? And that kind of clicks for people, I think, when you think about an isolated format like that. You just can't keep pounding dollars into the system and not expect there to be inflation.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tweeted M3 the other day, you know, just to show him whether you look at M2 or M3, it's the same thing. It's 41%. You know, not everybody's an economist. Not everybody's in the weeds with this stuff. We talk about M1, M2, and you showed charts, and I think we lose a lot of people.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially when the US dollar is still the best house in a bad neighborhood, right? So we feel it less. You only feel it with the dollar against other truly scarce assets. So we were able to get away with it, kind of this cheating for a long time. And this massive money printing that we did is like starting to catch up with us very quickly took a couple years, but I think it can really all be brought back to that.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the easiest way, obviously, there are a lot of factors, right? Countless factors. However, I think it can all be boiled down to oversimplify it to one material change, and that is a couple years ago, our government went crazy and started printing more money than they'd ever printed. So in the last 24 months, money supply in the United States is up 41%. We have printed 41% more dollars in the last 24 months. And that to me is kind of what just broke things open. That's why we're dealing with this ridiculous inflation. Can't put the genie back in the bottle. And there were a whole bunch of issues prior to that, which didn't get exposed because if you're printing six, seven percent more a year, it's not that big a deal. It's an abuse, but it's not an egregious abuse.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we talked about that at dinner the other night. I think that irrespective of where you are in life, whether you're super successful financially, professional athlete, all of these things, people are very concerned about the general direction that the world is going. And Bitcoin, both the asset and the ethos, represents maybe not a full counterculture, but a way to say something to get behind that says, hey, Government's not taken this in the right direction. I'd like to take a step away from the government.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought it was great. We had 25,000 people in one place and Bitcoiners get labeled for all this toxicity and stuff like that. And yet there wasn't a single new story of any kind about anything negative happening. Everybody, you know, was like, we were all really well behaved, right? And there were, I thought that aspect was great. Having been to my first Bitcoin conference totally coincidentally at that exact same convention center in 2013 The difference is just mind-blowing. The kind of the maturity, the different types of people, there were people wearing sports jackets there. I don't know if you saw that. There were some people wearing suits. There were adults walking around. The exhibit boots cost money and it wasn't just a bunch of people going around with t-shirts saying, you know, I can help you set up your wallet, which is all there was at the first one. That I went to. So, yeah, it's just remarkable.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was great to finally meet you in person. I've been watching your pods for a long time, and we've communicated a bunch of times, but nothing's quite as bad as having a meal together, right? Yeah, that's right.”
2022-04-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC074: Bitcoin is Property w/ Eric Weiss (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT