Now I think the audience has waited long enough
Now we move to the topic of Bitcoin
Yes, I think that's what the audience is waiting for
So, how did you discover Bitcoin as a great alternative to fiat currencies?
So, in my mind, I've always been looking for something like Bitcoin
Before Bitcoin even existed
I was already aware of a lot of these problems about fiat money before Bitcoin
And for me, at that time, the solution was gold
So, when I first heard about Bitcoin,
I don't even remember when I first heard about it
But I remember for the first two, three years that I heard about it,
I thought, ha, ha, ha, computer people think that they can do something better than gold
What do they know?
This is going to be a disaster
If you know Peter Schiff,
I was exactly like Peter Schiff when I first heard about Bitcoin
But that last, I heard about Bitcoin when Bitcoin was under $1
And I kept laughing at it until it hit about $1,000
And I was just sitting there saying it's going to collapse, it's going to die,
Government's going to shut it down, government will throw them in jail
And because of that, I didn't pay much attention to it
Because I just thought, obviously, it's going to die,
So why should I waste my time reading and learning about it?
Because, you know, very stupid thing to do
To assume that you know things so you don't need to learn about them
Because you already know them
The stupid trap where you're just stuck in the fact that
You don't know what you don't know, but you are sure that you know it
So because of that, I spent a lot of time not considering Bitcoin
Then around 2014, I started thinking
Okay, maybe this thing can work, maybe it won't die
And here we are 10 years later and it's still working
You know, 20 minutes ago, I was very, very excited
Because you told me Bitcoin is now worth $1 trillion
And Bitcoin is now worth $1 trillion
It might go up to $300 trillion
I was very, very excited
So what makes Bitcoin unique?
There are already millions of altcoins in circulation
And isn't it possible that someone creates a cryptocurrency
Which is more convenient, technologically advanced,
and or more universally accepted than Bitcoin?
I don't think they can create something like Bitcoin or better than Bitcoin
Because the tricky part about Bitcoin is
Not something that is just in code that you can copy
You can copy the code,
But you can't copy the magic juice that made it so special
And specifically, this is the case for Bitcoin, because, A, Bitcoin was the first
So it was the only one that was truly neutral
So nobody could control it
And the person who did it disappeared
He disappeared
And Bitcoin continued to grow without him
And it grew for now 14 years without the owner
Once you had a currency that was neutral
And can grow without its owner
Then everybody who's looking for a neutral currency that nobody controls
Is going to go to that currency
And then everybody else who's looking for something
That they can control is going to make their own currency
So the only currencies that remain after that are
Currencies that somebody built who can control
So in my mind, you can't, after Bitcoin, you can't go recreate it,
Make a new digital currency,
Let it grow, have it grow, without you being in charge of it
And if you're in charge of it,
Then you can change everything about it
So it's really the challenge of being able to create something and not control it
That's the really difficult part, I think
Okay, so the magic juice, as you say,
is neutrality and nobody controlling it, right?
That's the major point
Okay, now let's move to the future
For a while, fiat currencies and Bitcoin will coexist with each other, I guess
And what do you see after that?
Because trust in fiat currencies will continue to diminish as their values keep falling
For example, can you imagine that a new kind of gold standard is coming?
I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought
Oh yeah, gold standard, okay
In the fiat standard, in the last chapter,
I say that if governments want to kill Bitcoin,
The best thing that they can do is go on a gold standard
Because most people think, okay, if government bans Bitcoin, then Bitcoin dies
But in reality, it's usually the other way around
In fact, if you ban Bitcoin,
You are telling people, your money in the bank is not your money
Because I can tell you what to do with your money in the bank
And that just wakes people up
Oh wow, they can tell me what to buy
Would be great for me to have a form of money
That they can't tell me what to do with
Maybe I should get into Bitcoin
So trying to ban Bitcoin is advertising Bitcoin
Because they can't stop it
So they're just telling you
No, no, no, no, this thing is really good for you
And bad for us
You can't use it, please don't
And that's just an invitation to use it
So I think, but I think realistically,
There's no chance that they would go on a gold standard
They left the gold standard for a good reason
Well, good reason for them, bad reason for us
Good reason for them that it allows them to print money
And they want that and they're not going to give it up happily
And I also think, realistically,
Gold is just too old for a modern economy
If the world wants to go on a gold standard,
It's not just about changing the dollar sign on your balance sheet
What it means is that every country is going to have to start settling
With the central bank of every other country with physical gold
So Korea trades with China
It means that when you settle at the end of the month or the end of the week,
Korea has to send China gold bars, physical gold bars
And then China has to receive them and China has to verify them
How do you verify that gold is real and not fake?
With the big gold bars, you can only do one thing
You have to melt the whole gold bar down and then cast it again
So imagine how expensive this process is
And imagine how much cheaper and more efficient it is to do it with Bitcoin
Because currently, for less than a dollar
You can move a billion dollars from Korea to China
And verify that it's true
If you wanted to move a billion dollars of gold from Korea to China,
It would take many months and cost many millions of dollars to be able to pull it off
So you are mentioning the scalability across space problem, right?
Which gold cannot really solve, right?
But Bitcoin can solve the problem
Okay, so again
So you are mentioning the scalability across the space problem, right?
Which gold cannot really solve, but Bitcoin can solve that problem
So how do you realistically see the future?
Will you have kind of a Bitcoin standard
Or will you have Bitcoin and fiat standards together in maybe, I don't know, 30, 50 years?
I think we're likely to see the two coexist for a while
But I don't think that that is going to last for a very long time
Eventually, people are just going to upgrade for the better money
And I think what happens is
The Bitcoin-based economy is currently about less than 1% of the fiat economy
It's going to grow and become a bigger and bigger and bigger percentage,
And then it becomes even bigger than the fiat economy
And then the fiat economy continues to shrink
Now, when that happens,
I don't have a crystal ball
It's difficult to make time predictions
But I would say not before 10 years
Hopefully, before 30 years
Somewhere between 10 and 30 years we'll get that switch
Probably 10 is too early
Maybe somewhere between 20 and 40 years, I would say
That really sounds very exciting
So, the last question for you
You know, you say, saving makes investments possible
And gold and Bitcoins are saving assets which appreciate in value
But then that means you can actually increase your net worth
By doing nothing, just holding Bitcoin or gold
But then, how can potential entrepreneurs which have no money, get some money?
Because you have less incentives to invest, right?
So, I think the problem with this question is that
The value of money can only increase if people are investing
So, the premise is flawed in a sense that if people are not investing,
Then the value of money is not increasing
But even if the value of money is increasing,
People will still invest
Because investment can offer you a better return than just holding the money
And I think more saving leads to more investment
Because the way that it functions is,
First of all, you have money
The basic impulse that you have is to spend it all
We all want to spend all of the money that we have
We can't eat the money, we can't enjoy the money itself
But we can enjoy the things that it buys us
So, as human beings,
We just want the goods, the food, the houses, the clothes, whatever it is
So, first step is we have money, we want to spend it all
Second step is, no, let's save some
As you start accumulating saving,
You save so that you can provide for your future self
Once you reach a certain level of savings
Then you start thinking about investing
And so, as the savings appreciate more and grow in value more
You have more savings
Therefore you have more ability to invest
Rather than the other way around what the Keynesians try to do is
If we destroy the value of your savings
Then we just print new money
And then people invest the new money
But all that you're doing in that sense is that
You're taking the capital and the savings from the hands of their owners
And putting them in the hands of the central bank which decides where the investments go
And so, that's a form of central planning, effectively
So, now, finally, we have to conclude the discussion
Let me add two things
The first one
Before I came here, I was not a Bitcoin maximalist
Now, I am
Congratulations
And the second one
I also wrote a book about Bitcoin, generally about Bitcoin trading
And I told something about, in this bull market
Bitcoin might go up to 150,000 K,
Where I will correct my estimate upwards
Best of luck
Thank you
I mean, if Bitcoin goes up, it's tempting to sell some,
But then again, you never know when it stops going up
So, remember, it's very risky to hold on to fiat
If you sell Bitcoin, you're stuck with fiat
There's no alternative
You're stuck with something that's losing value
So, it's a very risky thing, be careful
True, true
Yes, because I think the correct thing
Against which you value it is not its past performance
I think it's its future potential
And so, potentially, I think, currently, about 0.5% of the world's cash balances are in Bitcoin
I don't think that Bitcoin is worse than the other 99.5%
In other words, think about it like a phone
If a new phone company comes up and they have 0.5% of the phone market
But you've tried their phone and it's better than all the others
Much better than all the others
Realistically, you don't expect their market share to remain at 0.5%
So, I think Bitcoin's market share likely grows a lot
But we can't make more Bitcoins
So, the only way that the market share can grow is
Through the growth in the value of the Bitcoins
I used to be a big fan of gold before I was into Bitcoin
But I think the technical limitations of the fact that gold is very expensive to move around
Is the reason why gold was replaced with fiat money
And so, I don't see us going back
I think technology moves forward
So, what Bitcoin allows us is to get the desirable properties of gold
Which is the fact that nobody can print gold for free
And combine it with the properties of the digital age
Which is the money that can move fast
So, you look at the world today
People continuously trade so much more with foreigners
Koreans today buy so much more things from outside of Korea
Than they did 100 years ago or 200 years ago, or 500 years ago
So, you have things here today that are made in America
Things that are made in Argentina, things that are made in Africa
And they're all being traded all over the world
We're moving goods around very, very, very quickly
Gold can't keep up because it's very expensive and slow to move around
So, I really think the important thing about gold is not that it's yellow or shiny
The important thing about gold is already in Bitcoin
The important thing about gold is not that it's yellow or shiny
The important thing about gold is already in Bitcoin
It's the fact that it is scarce
Nobody can inflate it
I don't see how you can, I mean, you can find the technical solutions to make gold faster,
But they all involve trusting in a centralized clearance mechanism
So, the way that it worked in the 19th century is central banks
So, ultimately, you can't just have every person move their gold physically
You can't, if you're a Korean importer
You can't be sending physical gold to all of your suppliers
You will be settling through the Korean Central Bank
with the Chinese Central Bank or the Brazilian Central Bank or whatever
And that's just going to mean that
Gold becomes centralized in the hands of government
And then they confiscate it
And then they give you the fiat money
We've already done that
So, the way to scale gold is to trust in central authorities
Once central authorities have the gold and the trust
You are going to go through a century of fiat
And war and bloodshed and destruction
And so, you need something that doesn't rely on trust in order to move fast
And if you wanted to do that with gold,
You would come up with Bitcoin
That's the solution
Honestly, I haven't thought about it, but do you want to do the translation?
Maybe, yeah, I mean, it's a lot of videos
It's about 40 hours of lectures and seminars
I don't know how feasible it is to translate them
But the books are translated and that's the most important thing
But I'll think about the courses
Maybe we'll translate
Maybe with AI, we can translate them
No offense
And the biggest weakness of Bitcoin is the fact that
I mean, it's not so much a weakness, it's the limitation
Ultimately, everything has a limitation
Bitcoin can only do about a million transactions a day
That's the maximum that it can do
Which is obviously not enough for the whole world
It's not even enough for one neighborhood in Seoul
There are more than a million transactions in one neighborhood in the city
So it's obviously not enough for everybody to use it on-chain
And it's clear that Bitcoin is going to have to scale through second- and third-layer solutions
And the more capacity we have
The more robust these scaling solutions are
And the less vulnerable they are to the government
To government attack
So if it was up to me,
I'd like to have Bitcoin have 10 times the current capacity
I'd like it if Bitcoin had 10 times as much capacity as it has now, but it's not possible
What I would advise young people is
Find a way to serve other people that is valuable
Give people something that they want
Figure out what you can do that is good for others
Everybody tells you you want to do what you love
I think that's terrible advice
You want to do what other people love
Work is not about you
Work is about serving others
So find what other people want
Find how to serve them
Focus on it so that you get better and better and better at it
The more you serve them, the more money you will have
And everything that you want comes from being able to give other people what they want
So focus on that
Work hard
Serve people
And then spend less than you earn, always,
And put the difference in Bitcoin
And hold it in Bitcoin for the long term
Thank you so much
I think it is a blessing to have people who read my work
It's something that I don't take for granted
It's something that I'm very grateful for
I'm happy to travel halfway around the world to see you
And to thank you for appreciating my work
I really, really appreciate it
Thanks a lot