YouSaid · the spoken record

Tuur Demeester

lines on the record: 73
first: 2021-07-07
most recent: 2021-07-07
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

“So, yeah, if you hear this podcast on the day of publication, just go find my Twitter account. You should be able to just follow me. If it's on another day, just find my Twitter account and do the request, like request to follow. And I can't promise that I'm going to try to approve everyone I can. And that's pretty much it. Sometimes I publish a medium article, but that's rare. I'm working on a long-form thing. It'll probably be a book. And it's probably way down the road. So there's more coming, but that's down the road.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and I want to say the gratitude is mutual, like, not just to you, but in general, to people that I get to interact with, because I do this for myself too. engaging in this conversation is what helps me understand things better and that in turn helps with conviction and making better decisions like I've become such a better investor you know by engaging with other people that so it's it's such a blessing it's it's incredible”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, also, you don't have to rush into this idea. Like, you can borrow as long as you did a little back of the napkin calculation. I think as long as you don't borrow more than 2-3% of the value of your Bitcoins at any time in terms of you borrow 2% of that value in dollar terms and you use it for everyday life, like say that your income is not enough instead of selling Bitcoin, you can kind of go that route forever. Like if you keep the percentages that low, you can just roll over your loans and the Bitcoin appreciation takes care of the interest and the new loans. Of course, it's very speculative for me to say that, but I think roughly speaking, it has held through historically. So it could hold true in the future as well. Especially with accelerating inflation.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About dollar denominated profits. Like, you know, you want to make your Bitcoin grow over time. That's what really matters. That's the benchmark to think about.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm using a lot of words to say that it's challenging, and I think, I mean, one of the things we're working on with Blockstream is to actually create products that have a conservative yield that don't aim for like, oh, we're going to give you 10% guaranteed every year or something like that, but that have a conservative yield and that are really respectful to how precious Bitcoin's really are. One of the things I think that Blockstream does really well is that because they're a full stack company, they've existed since 2015-14 is that they can do proper due diligence in a kind of a 360 degrees kind of way. And so that's why I've been really excited to, you know, I'm an advisor and I sold my company to them to work with them is that they just have such know-how on like what questions to really ask to dig into finding things that are more transparent than average, for example, things like that. So I think, I mean, I've been saying this for a few years now, but I think Bitcoin Alpha is the next frontier. Like who cares?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's one of the questions that always come back is like, okay, once I have Bitcoin, it's kind of like Warren Buffett, like I can fondle them, I can look at them, but like, how do I get more value out of them? How do I get a yield out of them or some kind of return? And that's what they call Bitcoin Alpha. It's like you use Bitcoin as the performance benchmark and then you want to outperform it year by year. It's challenging because, well, first of all, on the surface, it looks very easy. It's like, oh yeah, just go to these loan guys and lend out your Bitcoin and they're going to give you a yield. But when you're really trying to be responsible and have long-term thinking and really try to not lose your Bitcoin, I think due diligence is hard. It's hard to do in a way. It's like a black box. You lend out your coins and something magical happens behind the scenes and then you get more coins back. It's like, how do you know if something goes wrong, right? I mean, it's a very, very young ecosystem. Most of those companies are only a few years old.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rails to try and create something that's more efficient. I don't know exactly the composition of what's backing tether. I know the percentages are talking about this, but I don't know exactly what kind of bonds they have and stuff like that to back it. But I think it looks like a pretty stable model. I think if they have problems, it would probably more be on the regulatory side that somebody decides to go against it and freeze bank accounts or things like that. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a pretty brilliant solution to a genuine problem. It's like, how do people move dollar value between exchanges around the world quickly and inexpensively?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's exposing some of the real problems with the Fiat network. Like, I once kind of accidentally ran into Biff and XEO, and he told me that he was involved with international trade for a long time, like before Bitcoin, moving assets and money around the world, like producing real products and then selling them internationally. And so one of his big frustrations was always that it was so hard to move money around in the world, so, so hard. Of course, not between US and Canada, but once you're talking about jurisdictions that are way further apart. And so the whole support of the whole tether idea was that it's just like solving that problem. And I think they've done that pretty, you know, pretty brilliantly so far. It's kind of like a lot of the blame that's supposedly on Tether's shoulder is kind of like, well, yeah, it's imperfect because they are using imperfect rails. Like they're using the...”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they validate a transaction, they don't even know if there's tokens in it or not. That's the level of privacy. It's not even like they don't know how many, it's that they don't even know that there's tokens being moved in that transaction, in that block.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Open source code, but Blockstream pretty much came up with it and put together the consortium of companies that run the servers.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Far as I know, maybe something changed more recently, but as far as I know, like, yeah, you can see the tokens on the network.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I'm pretty much aligned with Alice Colleen on that one. I think smart contracts are always part of the roadmap for Bitcoin, like Satoshi tried to put them in the main chain. I think people later realized it's better to have it on higher layers.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One final word about that is that I would say the real stress test for like DeFi, decentralized finance has not really happened. I mean, come on be honest. Like we have not had a government crackdown on DeFi. And so we just don't know. We don't know how robust it is. I think it's actually a very brittle probably. But that's kind of the bread and butter of Ethereum is like all that stuff. So we'll have to wait and see how robust it really is once there's a serious, you know, I don't know, some kind of judge who makes an order or some government or something.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and also, like, we have Darwin on our side, right? I mean, we have the handicap principle in nature, which is animal species will develop traits that are inherently costly to do, like require a lot of energy, like a peacock with feathers or like the bees going all the way up in the air until they're the ones that win the race and get the queen. Why is that? It's because it's very hard to imitate. It's very hard to fake, right? You can't fake proof of work. That's why it's so valuable. And I asked Vitalik, like, what is your analogy for proof of stake? And he comes up with some kind of hostage scheme. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, back in the day with the kings, they could hold some people hostage and then, you know, exchange them. It's like, oh, that sounds so stable. That sounds like such an amazingly stable system.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20, 50 years from now, or do you want to just kind of like raise capital with some fancy buzzwords? And I really think the latter is happening. Like proof of stake has been tried. Like, dude, like this is the old thing. This is what they tried in the 90s. This is the thing that was discarded. And so all this voting stuff is totally brittle, proof of work was the beginnation. And you're just throwing that to me, you know, knocks down credibility of people immediately if they don't recognize the fundamental innovation of proof of work. Like people like the people involved with Cardano, for example, are very negative about proof of work. I'm like, to me, that's almost like an instant disqualification. Like, thank you for making my due diligence so easy. You're not getting something.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's like a graveyard of buzzwords that they have of things that they were going to plasma and they were going to do, what was the other thing? I'll find the word. But there's like a bunch of things that they were supposedly going to do, whereas Bitcoin has always been like literally this is going back to how Finney, I think, in 2011, second layer scaling, right? I mean, you scale in layers and that's modular scaling. It's just how things make sense. And so Bitcoin has been extremely consistent in that sense. You forget about the B cachers. Like they never got it in the first place. And they were never serious developers either. But so yeah, like, you know, the latest thing is it's kind of like, it's just a novelty-based network and they just always look for something new that they can with not a lot of thought about the long-term ramifications what they're doing other than, oh, but we're listening to the market. It's like, yeah, but you're not Facebook. Like, what are you talking about? Do you want to build a protocol that people are going to use?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's weird how it's not weird because I think it fits the pattern, but like they have a pattern of coming up with ways that they're going to scale the network that are totally kind of like blue sky thinking like, oh, well, yeah, here's a thought. And it's just like they're coming fresh out of a brainstorm session. Like, oh, we're going to scale with, I mean, I even forget the buzzwords anymore, but like there's like a”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I literally tweeted this today. I said, Bitcoin is a freemium model. The basic product hodling is almost 100% free. The fees are only charged once you start making transactions. And so there's this powerful flywheel effect where new users get onboarded with low friction and long-term users, they happily pay the fees that will sustain the network. That's the other side, there's mining, which is kind of like that, but also just getting involved in Bitcoin. For 10 or 20 years.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second life to this problematic currency, which is now running out. And so that's kind of my thesis about Ethereum proof of stake is that ultimately it's very brittle having a political system to defend the protocol. If you look at Ethereum's emission schedule, it looks like a squiggly line. It looks so random. It's because of all these hard forks and these random political decisions. It kind of looks like a Federal Reserve interest charge, to be honest. So I think that is just very clearly a different animal. It's like, what did Michael Saylor say? Like a shark duck that lives in the trees, not digital gold. So in terms of competing with Bitcoin, I think it's competing with the existing fiat system. And it could have a potential future in that realm.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rule by the rich. Like the rich people who are rich in Ether, they get to decide what rules are going to be made. And of course now they're saying like, oh, but Ether is a hard currency and we're never going to have inflation. It's like I want to wait and see what if there's kind of a bit of a bear market for Ethereum and big holders are kind of like shifting on their chairs and they're thinking about selling, well, why wouldn't they approve a resolution that says, oh, we're going to increase inflation so that you get more ethers staking rewards, which by the way, isn't that kind of what happened in 1980 with the US dollar? We had like 1970s. We had inflation. Then Volcker came in and said, hey, you guys, I'm going to make you love the dollar. We're going to create these government bonds that have very high yields so that you can stay in the dollar and you can stake the dollar and get annual rewards of 15, maybe even 20%. And that gave like a”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's unlikely to have, you know, to live beyond 20, 30 years and have any success because it's ultimately dilutive. It's a political system. If you're going to move to proof of stake, you're basically saying proof of work down the toilet. And the Ethereum Foundation have said so much about a month ago, I think they put out a statement like, hey, we're really doing this wasteful proof of work mining, which is like they're kind of like they created Ethereum miners who make their living supporting the network and now they're saying like, guys, you're fired, you know, which I think is a horrible anyway, so they're doing that and they're moving to proof of stake, supposedly, which is a political system where people get to the voting is not linked to doing any kind of work, but it's just linked to how many Ether you have. So it's basically”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Ethereum, I've actually changed my thinking somewhat in the sense that there might be a way that they can maneuver themselves to basically become part of the fiat system. If they can get some kind of support on the national level or higher, like the international fiat financial level, like the IMF level or whatever, because the central banks have a PR problem, like they want to create a digital currency, but it's totally unclear what problem they're trying to solve. They already have digital currencies, you know, the dollar and everything is digital already, and they're clearly not going to have a decentralized thing. So then what exactly are they offering? And so there's a small chance that Ethereum could get kind of co-opted by some nation state or someone's supernational financial institution. And that it kind of has a longer shelf life because it has that like political protection. But if that doesn't happen, I”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's understandable because these bubbles have been blown up for, you know, you could argue night since 1971, right? I mean, this is.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They capped the rents. So these are all things that, and that's why it's so appealing to try and be in an asset that you can just hold on throughout all the crazy, you just hold on to it, you don't move it, you don't sell it. And then once things start normalizing, your purchasing power is intact and high versus somebody who's been trying to skip from hot potato to hot potato, they've gotten burned over and over.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just a matter of how many trillion. And then, of course, we're having like rent control. Well, not really rent controls, but it's more like eviction bans, eviction bands, all kinds of market interventions. They've even, I think in California, they've forced insurance companies to keep insuring people that don't even pay the insurance for against fire and natural disasters. And so all that intervention, I think regular investors underestimate the effects of that on their portfolio over time because you are invested in a company that could be facing headwinds regulator in a heartbeat. All of a sudden, there's some kind of regulation and then that's stock snaps in half and it stays that way or you're invested in real estate. All of a sudden there's rent controls. Weimar Germany lots of rent controls. You could rent an apartment literally for the price of an egg for you. You could rent it for a month for the price of an egg because”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and one aspect I think that it's understandable why it's underappreciated by the market and most people, but I think it's important to look at is that the amount of interventionism is going to ramp up. And we've already seen that. A lot of people think, oh, 2020 was the exception. But like, no, to me, this is just a continuation of 2008. It was like people were like incredulous, like these giant bailouts. This is crazy. Or it's like in 2020, it was like, of course we're going to have bailouts.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, I mean, this is the path we're on, and maybe they're going to do a 180 and come up with something to back the dollar magically. But friends tried it too, right? They confiscated the lands of the church and they're like, now we have Asinas and these are really backed by real land. Of course, you couldn't redeem it, but it was supposedly backed by it. So it's like, you know, they're going to really have to back it by Bitcoin or something real, redeemable to kind of have a chance at preserving their currency, the value of their currency.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's any reading recommendation, although there's maybe other accounts that are a little bit more accessible, but there's a little book written by Andrew Dixon White. It's called Fiat Money Inflation in France. And so he's basically talking about it was originally published in 1876, but it's a very short little book, and he just talks about what happened with the money leading up to the French Revolution. And it's uncanny how many parallels there are. And literally QE, like quantitative easing, they did it. And then the economy revived and everyone was like, wow, this is amazing. And then there was another crash. And they did it again. And they did it again. And the succession of the QEs was ever more close to each other eventually. They blew up the currency. I think this is the path that we're on. It's weird to think about it because the dollar is supposedly the strongest currency and the US is the strongest economy.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My thesis so far is that we are still in a 2013 replay and so that this is the equivalent of, you know, we went to 65,000 back down to 30. That's roughly the equivalent of going to 270, back down to 100. And then a bit of doldrums six months or so, and then a 10x or something like that, right? And so if we do 10x from 20, 30,000, we're talking about 150 to 400,000 somewhere in that range. I mean, it's also like it's starting to get weird because we have so much dollar inflation, right? And so what does it even mean to dream of a $300,000 Bitcoin two years or three years down the road? How much inflation are we going to have had by then? 50%? I mean, who knows how much value the dollar will have lost by then in terms of purchasing power?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, a lot of people are going to own Bitcoin that don't even realize they do. Because if your insurance company owns Bitcoin or your pension fund owns Bitcoin, you're exposed to the price. You're exposed to that asset.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made my first spreadsheets comparing Bitcoin. And now we went all the way up to 7%, which was 1995. That's interestingly, I don't know, you could look at like, oh, what percentage of the population does it take for a revolution to spark, right? I think it's similar. People say 3% or 5% or something like that. Like, that's enough to make big change happen in society. And so maybe back in the internet, internet 1995, that was the tipping point, 7% adoption of U.S. households. So U.S. households, 7% of them were using the internet in 1995. And so, yeah, I think we're past that tipping point. Like this is, if you look at adoption curves, there's always like a slow beginning. And then that tipping point, and then it speeds up. And so I think that's what this is. I think we are, it's incredible to think, but I think adoption is going to speed up from here on now.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even if you have an audit, like can you trust it? Whereas Bitcoin, anyone can spin up a node and look on the blockchain and check if this address actually holds that balance, et cetera. And that with Taproot, we're having even more possibilities in that realm. So that's kind of my thesis as to why Bitcoin is such fantastic collateral. And of course, I mean, now Michael Saylor has come in and saying don't ever sell your Bitcoin. Just use some of it as collateral, borrow against it. It's going to go up in value. And then you borrow more to pay the interest and you're set. You don't have to ever sell because it's such good collateral. So to me, that's like such a ringing endorsement. And there's, of course, many more who are starting to use it that way.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Growing massively. If you think about it, like in the fiat world, which is how we grew up in, like it's literally the air we've been breathing for all our lives, the thing that had value was our labor, which is our income expressed in fiat currency. What's the other thing again? Maybe like your house, you know, you'd use your house as a store of value to borrow against, use that as collateral. And then wealthy people would use their equity portfolio. My thesis is that those stores of value are vulnerable to political wins because politics is going to get way more chaotic in the next decade or so. I think people are going to want much more reliable and verifiable types of collateral. And Bitcoin is brilliant in that sense. Because even gold is very hard to audit. For example, the Fed, we haven't gotten an audit of the Fed since I think 1953, right? It's very difficult and expensive.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commodities producers, for example, they can start Bitcoin mining. There's so many ways that traditional companies can get involved. So that's why it's so, no, I wouldn't change my thesis. I think it's kind of playing out like I thought it would.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't delved very deep into the Bitcoin derivatives market, like how it's evolving. I do understand that more and more insurance companies are getting involved. But then again, derivatives are a prerequisite because what a derivative is, it's just a bet, right? It's basically a contract that is a bet on a certain event happening at a certain time in the future. Basically, that allows companies to hedge their risks in a much better way than you could do if there's only a spot market. So for example, airline companies use a lot of derivatives to hedge the oil prices, for example. And so similarly, if you want large companies or, you know, like life insurance companies and those kind of companies to get really involved in Bitcoin, they need that ability. And so that's why I was so excited. Like we're seeing this derivatives market grow and it's going to kind of reel in the blue chips of the world to really get in there and get involved.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or go to the US that you know, so you had all these fallback options against the biggest empire in the world, which was Spain. And so similarly, I think today, cryptography plays that role. That is the thing that allows us as individuals who don't armies, but we can just not share our password or we can store our password, chunk it up in different countries in vaults and do multi-sig and all that stuff. So there's a mode there that's building that's really powerful. And that was, you know, the thesis is that basically we are now going through the Bitcoin Reformation and it's going to change society in many, many ways similar to the Protestant Reformation brought freedom of religion, for example, freedom of speech, things that we take for granted now were really claimed 500 years ago. And I think we're going to have new things that emerge from this big revolution.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then also having a group of people who are willing to stake their lives and reputations on this thing, which back then was the merchants. And now I would say in the report, I said the millennials, actually, I wish I had said the Bitcoiners because I do think you need your not only live and work in the digital sphere, but you need to actually move your welfare as well to really live in cyberspace, so to speak, or cyberspace. And one other aspect that is a parallel is that people have the ability to withdraw. They had the ability to defend themselves against very large forces because that's the thing. Like if you're smart, you want the upside, but you also want a fallback option if things go wrong. And so back then you could do that by, I mean, the Dutch, of course, they could flood their fields of the Spanish canyon. So they used water as a defense mechanism. But also you could use the boat and go to England.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thesis, and it's weird. It kind of started with me just I wanted to know more about Belgium where I'm from, so I just start reading a bunch of history. And I was like, I thought this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. And then finally, I was like, man, this is so interesting what happened 500 years ago when the bookprinting became a thing, you know, the price of books dropped from a year's labor to the price of the chicken over 100 years' time. Like that never happened before. And also so many technological innovations were happening with that allowed for global navigation of boats and sailing. Like you could for a long time, you could sail to another continent, but the challenge was always how do you get back? If you go to a new territory, how do you get back? And so you needed more advanced navigational tools. And then also in terms of doing business internationally.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agree. I was just thinking, how do you as a trader, right? I mean, if you do like medium term trades, you got to trade against something. And so I think gold is interesting because there is going to be, even if Bitcoin keeps outpacing. Goal, there's going to be a kind of a trading range or something like that. That's what I mean.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you'd have to look at stock to flow versus gold or something because it's true in dollar terms any model is just going to, the noise get just so it's like it's like Chernobyl, right? I mean, if you get high inflation, there's just so much noise that it doesn't make sense to look at a chart anymore. I started looking at charts in commodities terms rather than dollar terms. Those make a lot more sense to me now than dollar denominated, like real estate or bonds. It doesn't say anything to me if I look at a dollar denominated chart.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think some of it, I think some of them I need to kind of review my notes on it because I remember being critical in the beginning and then I didn't really check my notes again on like what exactly was I skeptical about. I think there's a few variables that are just not taken into account in it. And also like if you tweak the variables a bit, all of a sudden the price goes to infinity or like so there's there's a few things there that I'm not sure about if everybody buys into it, it's going to invalidate itself because like models do tend to do that if they become too popular the market just invalidates them over time.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could make the argument that there's a bunch of Bitcoin that are being sold now that otherwise would not have been sold just because the miners are needing liquidity to get out of this quagmire. I don't know. I need to think about what it means if the whole cycle would be affected by it. I still feel like there's however many billing people on the planet, I still feel like those are going to be more of a driver of the whole price dynamic than the miners are going to be, even if they sell a lot. If people think it's undervalued, they're just going to pile in and buy. I'm pretty optimistic still about the 30,000 is going to be the height of irony if this gets aired and we've broken below it. But I'm still pretty optimistic that we may really hold this level. Maybe we'll like drop like I have a big scare and drop to like 23,000 for a week or something, but I think it should recover pretty quickly. But so yeah, I think it's more up to the overall market to decide where the price is going to go and how fast.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way. And it's, you know, if you look at capacity, like, for example, say that you have like a 2,000 terahash, for example, working, which would be like a bit over $200,000, something like that to put that, to deploy that, you can mine about a Bitcoin every two months at the current rates. One Bitcoin every two months. So like on an annualized basis, that's basically you get your money back in way less than two years time. Of course, that's, you know, I'm not saying that's going to keep being this way. Although when the difficulty rates drops, the proposition gets even more attractive for the existing miners. So I'm positive on what's going on there. I think it's an interesting time. We're kind of in the doldrums a bit with Bitcoin. And so, yeah, I'm excited. I mean, I'm mostly involved with Blockstream, so I know mostly what they're doing in the mining space. But I think it's interesting. Because where do you diversify?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think right now mining is really interesting because we talked about the semiconductor shortages, the hash rate redistribution, because China basically existing miners are an interesting value proposition, I think, because one of the challenges for mining was back in 2013, you would put in an order, you would have so much risk, basically. You'd put in an order as like one single individual for a couple thousand dollars. And then you would order a machine and they would arrive six months late, if at all. So just crazy risk. And then you had the like cloud mining guys. They would kind of say, okay, we're the middleman. Now we're going to place those orders. We're going to aggregate them, but they also had the same problem of these delays and stuff. But now we actually have miners that have built up real capacity that's actually deployed. And they're kind of building on ramps for investors to then participate in kind of a much more risk sense.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just massively taxing their own merchants, putting up all kinds of crazy restrictions. And so the merchants would literally abandon ship. They would just go elsewhere or just give up. And so in a way, they can just shoot themselves in the foot. And I think that's potentially what China is doing, also with the crackdown on Hong Kong and stuff. If you chase out your billionaires, like who's going to be motivated to start the next startup?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it also shows the brittleness, like giant empires have this weird, they build up this brittleness where they assume they know how to deal with the threats, but when they face a new kind of threat, they can get it so wrong, but they have this habit, like they're so big, they can just smash their fist on the table and just get rid of it. And I think this is really a major miscalculation. And then people push back when I suggested it, but it reminds me of Spain in the 1500s, 15, 1600s, when they were the largest empire on Earth. They had untold amounts of colonies and income from their colonies. And still, they managed to just lose it all in a matter of, I don't know, 100 years. You know, there was, of course, inbreeding and problems like that, like local political problems internally. But a lot of it was just like they were just kind of arrogant.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speak of David versus Goliath. I mean, we're talking tiny El Salvador against China, right? I mean, that's kind of the two examples that are most in everybody's mind, right? Who's going to win?”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't know. I think it's going to be a hard battle with the mining, but in a sense, it doesn't really matter because if local politicians are going to vote against Bitcoin mining, the capacity, we've seen it. This is the perfect example. Capacity is just going to move elsewhere. And China is the biggest, probably in the next, we might not see a move like this in the next century, like the next 100 years for Bitcoin mining. Like where is ever going to Bitcoin mining be so concentrated like 50% of the capacity is going to move in a matter of months? That is not going to happen again, I don't think.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure. I mean, yeah, in Texas, I think people are definitely working to kind of bring that story because it's totally valid. Like so much of what's being produced here is like, ooh, like way in the West where there's just very, very sparse population. And so you're not taking anything away from the big cities. You're just creating excess supply, like new supply instead of gas being flared as being converted into Bitcoin mining. But then if you avoid flaring it, you do have to set up the capacity to make electricity, which that is making the pie bigger. But yeah, on a national level, I don't know. I feel like something can be so crystal clear and so logical to from our point of view. And if somehow the political winds blow differently, it just gets blown out of the water. People ignore it. They're looking at their constituents and what they're going to vote for and they're trying to, in a way, front run what they think people are going to think.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, 15 grams of gold per ton, like super high yields. And so it'd be like, oh man, let's fund a gold mine because you can calculate how much you could make. There's billions of dollars in the ground there. It's amazing. Let's do this. And time and time again over and over, they would get kind of victims of their own success. Because if it did well in the mind, the local politicians would just boycott you, whether deliberately or not, but you would just get caught up in bureaucracy or somebody would take over your mind or it just something inevitably would go wrong. And that's why most of the gold mining capacity is still in the US and Canada and Mexico because they're more stable jurisdictions. And so I think for there's an analogy there for Bitcoin mining where even if, I don't know, there's massive capacity somewhere, you're still going to want to go to the jurisdictions that give you the long-term security, not exactly what you were talking about.”
2021-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · BTC033: Important Bitcoin Considerations w/ Tuur Demeester (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT