Bitcoin As an Asset (Why Bitcoin is Unique in Human History)

Malcolm and Simone have an in-depth discussion on why they believe Bitcoin is valuable as an investment asset, especially for the ultra wealthy. They cover topics like Bitcoin's divisibility, transportability, known supply, and increased ownership compared to other assets like gold. They also talk about how Bitcoin could be useful in various societal collapse scenarios compared to precious metals, and what risks there still may be to its long term value.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] If I have a caravan and I'm trying to move assets between two locations in like medieval Europe or something like that.

And that caravan had a lot of gold in it, right? If that is raided by a group of bandits, those bandits, because the, the gold is easily divisible, it can easily divide it. They can easily use it even in small increments to buy a beer. You know, you could, you know, historically in the old West, that's where they'd grow out their nails.

They'd scrape a little bit of gold dust. And they'd use that to buy a beer. But, but If you are a group of bandits and you raid a carriage and it's full of art, expensive art, that is incredibly hard to fence. That is incredibly hard to make of use to you.

And the amount of money you're going to get from that is dramatically lower than the amount of money a wealthy person could get from that. And for those reasons, There is differentially less reason to raid those carts. Now, with crypto, it's a little different. If [00:01:00] I split my key. between multiple carriages for anyone to gain access to any of it.

They would need to successfully heist every single carriage was a portion of my key I hope it now makes sense to you why this is such a valuable asset to the ultra wealthy.

And then the question is, do we live in a world where Wales is being more and more concentrated among a smaller and smaller class of people? And to me, the answer there is f*****g obviously.

Simone Collins: You know, you're number one. You are the sun around which we revolve.

Malcolm Collins: That is not true. You are the best and I love you. You shouldn't. But we're going to talk about Bitcoin today. Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. So we got a comment under we, we had done a video on you know, investment and we mentioned Bitcoin briefly in that video and, and, you know, why I thought I liked it more than precious metals.

It's like a longterm investment and we're, we're pretty heavily invested in, [00:02:00] in that area of crypto at least. And one of the comments said. You like, I know I would never get Bitcoin because you don't own your own Bitcoin. You know, it's always on another exchange like FTX or something like that. But with gold, I can own my own gold.

And when I saw that I was like, holy s**t. Like even in our audience, which I consider a fairly educated audience. I was surprised by the lack of like knowledge about like the basics of Bitcoin as an investment or the way Bitcoin works or why it has value. If you are a Bitcoin person, you would hear something like that and just guffaw at the insanity of it.

Because it is so super incorrect. So what we wanted to take this podcast to do is explore Bitcoin. As an asset, i. e. not as a technology, like not why, and I think this [00:03:00] is the problem with Bitcoin videos, is they so often approach it being like, Ooh, here's like the technical part of like why it's cool, here's like the whatever, you know.

Great.

Simone Collins: Or like, here's how to invest and look at these weird charts and this is my

Malcolm Collins: method. Yeah, yeah. Or like that, like, oh, here's it going up into the right and here's it going down and this is how you do it and you

Simone Collins: know, because of the, this and that, like how it's going to change, blah, blah, blah. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Whereas I want to try to do an episode on Bitcoin and this is why I didn't really prep for this episode. Otherwise I would have on an episode on Bitcoin. Interesting. So just at the highest conceptual investment level, like as an asset. discuss why it's a thing of value and why I think it will be a thing of long term value that I am very interested in, in participating, like long term when I think about my kids and stuff like that.

All right, let's do it. Well, so Simone, do you want to take a start in the basics of what you understand of how Bitcoin works? [00:04:00] Okay.

Simone Collins: Things I personally like about Bitcoin. One is it's not owned or run by a government. It you know, although there are obviously complications to this, like where the supply could be manipulated if enough people who Bitcoin.

Sort of decide they want to change this another thing that made it stand out to me is that you actually really can own this. And, and this is an asset that when s**t hits the fan, you can take with you and you literally don't have to have anything as long as like, you've, you've remembered recovery.

Phrases. And that's kind of scary. I mean, you could have it written somewhere. You could have it you know, like all these different friends, like hold different ones. Like there, there are many different ways you can do it, but like, literally, you don't even need to have any sort of device or thing and you can still have your value and it's not on an exchange.

It's not where people can get it.

Malcolm Collins: And hold on, I want to double click on what you said there because you're just like listing facts. And I think that that second point is something [00:05:00] that can be kind of confusing and that was clearly confusing to the individual who first heard about this. Okay. Okay.

Dive in. So crypto is an asset at the most basic level. And I said this in the, in the previous episode on this subject, it is the first time in human history in which we have had an asset with a known quantity that is divisible. Easily tradable. And a person could say, well, you don't have full ownership over it, which is just not true.

You actually have a fuller ownership over Bitcoin than you do gold or any asset. You literally have more ownership over your Bitcoin than you have over a block of gold you are holding in your hand. So why is that the case, that that is the case because unlike the block of gold that you are holding in your hand and someone could come along and yank it.

With Bitcoin, if you have [00:06:00] memorized your passphrase, you literally, there is no way to access it other than, than hacking the entire blockchain. You can be

Simone Collins: tortured. You can be tortured. You can be

Malcolm Collins: tortured, but do you understand that that is an additional level? You can be tortured for like, the location of your gold or something like that, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But somebody could also externally find your gold. You could have

Simone Collins: somebody come. No one can find, no one can find your, your Bitcoin or other crypto. Voluntarily

Malcolm Collins: give up that information. And that is wildly different from any other now, now voluntary, obviously torture and stuff like that.

But that is a level of self ownership that goes beyond the self ownership of gold. And then somebody could say, well. He doesn't understand Bitcoin very well, so it's useful for me to explain this. Well, okay but where is it actually stored? Like, who actually has it if you just have a [00:07:00] code in your head?

And think of it like this. It's distributed among everybody who has Bitcoin. That's who has it. It's actually a little bit more nuanced than that. It's sort of like everybody who has a node that's operational for Bitcoin., so there's around 13, 000 Bitcoin nodes. So everybody who has one of these, and you can set one up in your house, right, if you want to, and participate in the system, is who's storing it for you. And when there is... Between the nodes incongruencies. So like, suppose like a portion of the nodes are like, I want to change what's on the blockchain.

You need to get like, basically everyone with a node to immediately participate in this charade. When you personally can set up a node whenever you want. Like, it's just comically almost impossible to

Simone Collins: do. Culturally, extremely libertarian, independent people, too. So it would take a lot,

Malcolm Collins: I think.

Yeah so [00:08:00] that's interesting. And it would also lower the value of Bitcoin as an asset, if anyone found out, for everyone else who owned Bitcoin. Like if it could be easily taken like that. And this is what people mean. If you hear somebody online saying something like not your keys, not your coin, which you probably heard a lot with crypto what they're saying is that if you give up your keys, like if you don't know the keys to your own crypto. Right. Well, then whatever exchange they're on has access to that, right?

And they can go bust, they can screw up. And this has happened multiple times throughout crypto probably happened less as time goes on, but it, it, it occasionally happens. Right. But this can also happen with assets like gold and stuff, but to, to go into this, well, then an individual might say, yeah, but you have to initially buy your Bitcoin through an exchange.

Right? And that means you don't fully own it. And this is just wrong. This is like saying, because I b It is true that like the easiest way to buy crypto is through an exchange. It's not the only way, but [00:09:00] the easiest way is to buy crypto through an exchange. This is like saying because you buy your block of gold that you then take home and put under your bed at a store, That you don't really have access to that gold.

You do. As soon as you take your keys off the chain and verify that those keys are real, as soon as you have bought a crypto specifically, we're just talking mostly about Bitcoin on this, on a chain, and then you have taken the keys from the chain and you, you. To have it yourself, you now have full access to that.

Simone Collins: Yeah, although I will say it is surprisingly hard for unbanked children. Sorry, let me, let me repeat that. It is, it is, it is actually really hard for many unbanked people. So like a lot of people working in the sex trade when they started out. With Bitcoin and crypto, they were really excited.

They're like, this is great. This is the solution. I can accept payment because many banks aren't willing to work with you once that happens. But now like, because [00:10:00] there are all these KYC requirements, especially for us based exchanges before you can even like start to trade on them or buy. Or except you have to, you know, have a bank account that is associated.

You have to do all this stuff with your identity. Like it is imperfect. And there aren't great systems. If you're totally going off the grid, it seems with your, with your crypto, I'm sure people are developing better things, but I would say it's still a problem. Like a lot of people who. Are trying to use this system the way it should be used where you don't have to be involved with legacy banking are still struggling.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that's a misunderstanding of crypto. So I think that the Bitcoin nerds right now when they're trying to talk about why crypto has value, they're wrong. Crypto is never really a good alternative to the mainstream system. It may be for high end purchases, but we'll get to it. Well, actually, I'll get to that right now.

So we used to live part time in Peru. And in Peru when I am buying a soda, or when I am buying a, [00:11:00] something at a restaurant, right, or I am buying from a grocery store, I am buying in Peruvian soles, um, when I am buying a large asset like a company or a house, I I am almost always buying in American dollars.

And this is a normal way that economic systems subdivide, right? I can very easily see an economic system in which Bitcoin is used for large transactions and dollars or local currency is used for small transactions. And when I say large transactions, I mean, enormously large transactions. And this is where it gets really interesting.

I think the core value of. Bitcoin specifically has always been to the world's ultra wealthy. Never, never to the average person, the average person. And so, people would be like, well, what do you mean by that? Right? Like, and we've mentioned this on the, the last time we talked about it, but it is worth [00:12:00] going into a bit, like why.

Is art such a thing of astronomical value to wealthy investors? It's because an artist can die. And when an artist dies, you have a broad understanding of how many of those artistic pieces there are in the world. Now, of course, like Bitcoin, there's also market manipulation within the field, but that's a core reason why historically art had value.

Because an artist could die which could give you a set number of those artistic pieces in the world and those pieces are light and easily transportable. Yeah,

Simone Collins: relatively speaking, like easier than gold bars in many ways,

Malcolm Collins: you know. Right, but I mean, this is why art was used instead of gold bars historically because it was more easily transportable.

And you knew how much of it there was with something like gold historically, you could always presumably find some new vein or some new way of extracting it from the earth. And, and this has happened repeatedly, right? Like that makes it a very dangerous asset.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But Renoir, he's dead. He's super dead.

Right.

Malcolm Collins: [00:13:00] Yeah. And you could find new art or people can forge art, right. You know, which is why there's such big industries around detecting that or, or finding new art, but presumably the numbers that you're going to find are fairly limited. And this is a huge value if you're an ultra wealthy person.

Right? Because as ultra wealthy people, there historically have been periods in which society has turned against you and you needed to either be able to hide assets or move with lots of assets at once. And gold is typically a really bad asset to move with. An additional benefit of art is that it's harder to fence to non ultra wealthy people.

So let me,

Simone Collins: Oh, I see. Like you're trying to buy a property in some other country because you're hiding, like you're in hiding as a wealthy person. And you're like, listen, I have this van go, like, take it and give me your beautiful mansion and mysterious nowhere come country. And they're like, well, what am I going to do?

It's like, well, you know, like they would

Malcolm Collins: do a deal like that. And then it has happened. So like the shroud of [00:14:00] Torin actually was traded for two castles in Italy. Oh. As an example of like art or relics being traded for high amounts, you know, that's now, well, I mean, this, this, this matters, right?

Because to wealthy people, this has value. They can trade it to other wealthy people to for other very large things. The, the, the but with gold. So like, imagine I have a caravan, like this is medieval times.

I have a caravan that's moving between two cities. That's trying to move my wealth, right? If I have a caravan and I'm trying to move assets between two locations in like medieval Europe or something like that.

And that caravan had a lot of gold in it, right? If that is raided by a group of bandits, those bandits, because the, the gold is easily divisible, it can easily divide it. They can easily use it even in small increments to buy a beer. You know, you could, you know, historically in the old West, that's where they'd grow out their nails.

They'd scrape a little bit of gold dust. And they'd use that to buy a beer. One like nails worth was one anyway, so.

Sorry, [00:15:00] it was the saloons, I think. We'd get the pinky, the long pinky nails for the scooping of gold dust. Anyway, Simone. So, But, but If you are a group of bandits and you raid a carriage and it's full of art, expensive art, that is incredibly hard to fence. That is incredibly hard to make of use to you.

And the amount of money you're going to get from that is dramatically lower than the amount of money a wealthy person could get from that. And for those reasons, There is differentially less reason to raid those carts. Now, with crypto, it's a little different. If you, if you raid it and you get access to the key, you have full access to it.

But that's if you gain access to the key. But this allows you to do things like ship parts of the key separately. So, for example, like when we die, different parts of our family who don't like each other have different parts of our crypto keys.

Simone Collins: Well, and friends who don't know each other exist. Yeah.[00:16:00]

People, people have our keys who do not know each other, have never heard of each other. I have no idea who else has been looped into this thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And they have a system that we have developed for bringing them all together and gaining access to all of that crypto, even if we die, right. But this is very different.

Well, and we also have a system where we don't know our own keys. So even if somebody were to torture us, they couldn't gain access to our keys. I suppose I should make that clear. All of our keys

Simone Collins: are, I think also there's the problem of we cannot remember.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They're all, they're all maintained through these treasure hunt systems.

But anyway which is fine. It's much more fun, but, but that's really interesting because what that means, suppose historically you had Bitcoin

Simone Collins: instead of, doesn't that just mean we would be tortured for longer because they wouldn't believe us.

Malcolm Collins: It makes sense if you knew us.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it would, yeah, but it's not like, you know, people torturing you or really close to you.

Eh, true. I always worry about that. Like, I worry about the scenarios in which Cause you know, I, I'm an easy pushover. You [00:17:00] know, someone, you know, looks at me the wrong way and I'm like, I'll tell you everything. But if I'm literally like, I don't know, they'll think I'm just not breaking. That's so gosh, scary scenario.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. So let's talk about this historically from a Bitcoin perspective, right? So suppose instead of moving gold or instead of moving Bitcoin between two locations and I'm doing this in old timey carriages, right? Okay. This is medieval period. If I split my key. between multiple carriages for anyone to gain access to any of it.

They would need to successfully heist every single carriage was a portion of my key and have the instructions for how to put it together, which might be a different carriage or the courier. Not that it couldn't be done, but I hope it now makes sense to you why this is such a valuable asset to the ultra wealthy.

And then the question is, do we live in a world where Wales is being more and more concentrated among a smaller and smaller class of people? And to me, the [00:18:00] answer there is f*****g obviously. This is not a trend that's reversing, and in a world with wealthier, rich people, crypto has an increasing level of value, specifically Bitcoin.

Yeah. We could talk about, oh yeah, but what about ETH? Like, that's like ethical Bitcoin, right? Except the code base gets changed pretty unilaterally all the time. And if they ever wanted to, they could just change it. It really has none of these assurances that Bitcoin has. Like I've been going over and over again, all these assurances that make it such a stable asset ETH doesn't have those assurances.

Yeah. Now I'll tell you what Bitcoin does not f*****g have. And this is important to understand if you've only heard about it from the Zeitgeist. It is not an untraceable. It might be the single f*****g most traceable asset in the world. Which is part of what makes it you know, easy to verify.

But if you've gotten into Bitcoin because you think you've gotten some form of currency [00:19:00] that people can't trace where it's going. They may not be able to trace who owns a wallet, but even that is harder these days with government controls. It is, it is dramatically more traceable how it's being used than dollars, or gold, or even bank accounts, really.

If you're using a lot of, like, International like offshore bank accounts and stuff like that. So that's an important thing to note. If you wanted an iteration of something like this, like Manera might be better. If you're like, I want something that actually is like untraceable, untraceable, but even that stuff, I don't know, like you can look into that category of crypto.

That is not why I think it has value. Because that's a, that's a smaller minority of people who value the thing because it's untraceable. Bitcoin's value is just its fungibility, transportability and known quantity. Like that's it. Now, um, what other misconceptions do I often

Simone Collins: hear here? Well, I think a lot of people are like, well, there's zero practical application.

No one's using this. No one [00:20:00] can use this for day to day transactions. Zero f*****g

Malcolm Collins: practical application of art.

Simone Collins: Well, but I mean, I would also argue that when we go to various communities in Latin America, when we look at Venezuela, like suddenly crypto is pretty pervasive. Not always Bitcoin, quite frequently Bitcoin.

So let's.

Malcolm Collins: Let's, yeah, and this is actually an interesting point that you're making here. Crypto has differential value in economic situations in which people do not have trust in their governments. Okay, so if you're thinking about it as an investment asset, I ask a question. Do you think That 50 years from now, people will have more trust in their governments than they do today or less trust in their government than they do today.

I, I think it's pretty obvious. For me, the biggest question I have about Bitcoin as an asset is [00:21:00] supercomputers. And how long until it's cracked because when the blockchain is cracked and we have friends who off the record have told us that they, like, if you look at like the quantum computers that they're working with, they're not that far from being able to do it or they could even do it right

Simone Collins: now.

Yeah, it could even be the case that for over a year, someone, multiple people have cracked this. They just, there's a clear incentive to not talk about it. Now,

Malcolm Collins: this is what's really interesting to what Simone is talking about here. If you crack Bitcoin with a supercomputer. You actually have a huge economic incentive to not let anyone know that you've cracked a Bitcoin.

Otherwise, everything you take from it has no value, and you would take stuff at small levels. You'd likely do a Superman thing, like a tax on everyone who has Bitcoin. Right. Now what's interesting about these quantum computers is, at least my understanding of existing technology, is you really can't have that many at a time.

And they can really only be operated by [00:22:00] large state or comp... Corporate institution.

Simone Collins: What do you mean? You can't have that many at

Malcolm Collins: a time. I just mean they're incredibly expensive to

Simone Collins: build.

 I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10, 000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. .

Simone Collins: Oh, it wasn't like very few people would be able to afford. Well, now, so I've heard some people be like, well, I found this method that would enable me to do it without tons of money.

So, I mean, it's plausible that someone has developed a method that's actually affordable. Less plausible than the people who are brute forcing it with money, of course, but still

Malcolm Collins: so that's what I worry about was Bitcoin is is does increasing technology make it less relevant. And I think that is a really real and very big fear, but I think it doesn't

Simone Collins: I guess.

Yeah, I guess there's less risk with the US dollar because there's so many different processes

Malcolm Collins: at play. Here's the other thing. People would say, well, what if governments ban it? Right? Like that could hurt its value and that can hurt its value in the [00:23:00] moment, but over the long term, look, let me put it this way.

How much,

how many Chinese people do you think own Bitcoin? And how many times do you think China has banned Bitcoin? Right? Like a lot, a lot and a lot. So, Yeah. If anything in increasing in frequent bans, just make it like, prove its use case more to individuals.

Hearing the government banned something once is scary for its longterm potential. Hearing that the government had to ban something like five different times. Is very promising to that things. Long-term potential.

Because it indicates that the government clearly is having trouble actually banning its use. And therefore, you know, an asset does not require government approval to continue to be of utility. And also any negatives from the bands are already baked into the price of the asset.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And, and I think for us, for us though, like [00:24:00] the big thing for us was doing a lot of work with Venezuelans and.

Doing a lot of work in Latin America and just seeing it actually in everyday use because for us we were first exposed to crypto in Like 2012 and it was always in this really like abstract kind of difficult to use environment So I was just like well This is always gonna be relegated to like super techie people who are really into it from a theoretical standpoint And then when I saw super non tech savvy people using and exchanging crypto I realized, oh, wow, okay, so even people who are not into tech, who don't even own a PC, or like, you know, like anything, a lap, like anything larger than a smartphone are using this.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I'm interested. And let's talk about gold for a second, right? So people can be like, yeah, well, the government can't like, it can ban your ability to hold Bitcoin, but it can't ban your ability to hold gold. And it's like, literally the U S government has done that [00:25:00] before. The when did the US government do this?

Five, a gold reserve act banned the ability to personally hold gold with the exception of jewelry and collector's coins. So this has happened before, right? Like no, any asset that threatens a weak currency is going to be subject to potential bans. The question is how easy is it for the government to search your house for that asset?

Gold fairly f*****g easy, especially with current technology. Bitcoin basically f*****g impossible. sO, that

Simone Collins: is, you just made the point that it's like easy to trace, so that's a problem.

Malcolm Collins: , what you'd say is the boat. That's what everyone says. The boat? I lost it in a boating accident. I had all my keys in the boat, and then the boat sunk, and I don't

Simone Collins: have them anymore. You know, or you were one of those people who tried to memorize your keys and you forgot them, or, you know, they're, they're, There's so many famous cases though, like [00:26:00] already, of people who bought Bitcoin, you know, and it was like, This really theoretical thing and they completely forgot about it because they thought it was worth absolutely nothing.

And then, you know, especially when Bitcoin was at its height, like around the pandemic, they're, they like, you know, are digging through old like computer wreckage to try to find where like maybe

Malcolm Collins: they can prove that Bitcoin went to a wallet that you at one point had control over. Doesn't mean people can prove you have it right now.

Exactly. Which is important. So people can know when you. Spend Bitcoin on something. So if I'm spending Bitcoin on something illicit, people can easily prove that people can not easily prove that I currently have Bitcoin, which is important to note. Now, another thing to note about gold as an asset, and this has always been very confusing to me about gold, there requires a very specific and narrow level of social collapse to be of utility as an asset.

Let me explain what I mean by this. So for gold to be the, the single like recurring reserve of asset. I would [00:27:00] need most global economies to break down, right? So like the United States, everything like that, like the Europe, et cetera. I would need the internet to break down because you know, Bitcoin would need to not be a better asset, but I would need people to broadly understand the value of like a scarce tradable metal and be able to test it.

That is, that requires, like, a level of social cohesion, which is just very unlikely in these other meltdown scenarios.

Simone Collins: So what do you say to the people who are like, and that's why I just buy guns and

Malcolm Collins: ammo? I think that is a very valuable thing to invest in. I think guns and ammo, so pretty much if society falls below a certain level of technology or a certain level of social cohesion, guns and ammo become the core store of value.

Very, very, very obviously. And that being the case I can understand the [00:28:00] huge swath of levels of which society could collapse below, let's say, like, 10 percent societal stability. Below 10 percent societal stability, guns and ammo are the core source of value, right? Gold becomes the core store of value between, like, 10 percent and 15 percent societal stability.

It's a very narrow range where you still have global networks of trade, but the internet is down. Okay. Between I'd say like 15 and like 60 percent societal stability. So these are scenarios in which people don't really trust most governments, but the internet is up. Global trade is. Kind of operational, but with private piracy, those are the scenarios in which bitcoin is the core asset of value.

So it's just like a much wider range and much more likely range in terms of when I look at real outcomes for the world that I think we're going to fall into. You know, as I say, [00:29:00] I think the world's heading to where South Africa is today in terms of stability. So rolling blackouts don't mean the internet has no value or bitcoin has no value.

Right? It's the same was you know, unsafe streets, unsafe care, you know, moving assets. All of that stuff only increases the value of Bitcoin, right? Even frequent blackouts doesn't make the internet go away as like. I think things need to get pretty fucked for the internet to go away. That's my take.

Simone Collins: That's actually a scary thought. I, I, I don't know how much there is protecting the internet the way it works

Malcolm Collins: now. Well, I mean, we've had some friends. The other thing that I, I know people have stored as an asset in case of collapse is Yeah. And then they have other hard drives they can put it on and, and, and trade it for.

And they have it in their

Simone Collins: clarity cages, obviously, because that's very necessary. Yeah. So

Malcolm Collins: they, they put the, by the way, they took, they took Wikipedia from [00:30:00] before the before times, before it became all biased and everything, which now is wildly biased, but yeah.

Simone Collins: Isn't that fun? Yeah. So, I mean, there, there's, there are scenarios in which it matters.

I don't. I don't think people should Like I've said before, buy any sort of crypto, not being ready to lose all of it. And for multiple reasons, like the value can go to nothing. You could lose your keys. But also like never, never consider buying a currency if you don't have a cold wallet. That you plan to move it to like leaving it on an exchange.

I agree. It's not a good idea. So, there

Malcolm Collins: you go, right? Yeah. And there's also weird things you can do with all this. It's split up portions of your key and make it so that even you can't easily access it, which is the way that we handle everything, which is weird to a lot of people, but I think it makes us marginally safer.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I am sure people have much more [00:31:00] sophisticated ways. of going about this, but we're just talking about like basic functionality here and why it gives us hope. And I think a lot of why we like it is ideological because we have this sort of libertarian view that people

Malcolm Collins: should have. I disagree. I don't f*****g, I think Bitcoin has value because the number of tyrants in the world is going to increase.

I think the core bet I'm making this Bitcoin is tyrants go up. Government stability goes down.

Simone Collins: so Yeah, it's, it's, it's very real risk. You're, you're not, you're not at all wrong. As depressing as that may be. So it's, you know, it's a good hedge, but again, I think you should be ready to lose all of it because you know, the world is unpredictable and it's a weird asset.

Well, I

Malcolm Collins: understand you're saying, oh yeah, we are not investment advisors, blah, blah, blah. We're just talking about something from like a conceptual standpoint. Yeah. And, and you're saying, yeah, don't invest anything. This is true with any investment class. Don't invest anything. You're not prepared to lose.

But I [00:32:00] mean, I broadly think that most metal assets that were traditional value stores, gold, silver, et cetera, they're just going to decrease over time, long term.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I definitely have a lot less confidence in precious metals. That are not like strategically undervalued now, like we're talking about stuff that's used in batteries that are going to be.

Ramping up in production, for example, right? Like that's different. But just like traditionally precious metals is

Malcolm Collins: the proxy for wealth. In, in historic context, because they're just like super unusable as wealth stores and, and, and wealth movers. And if you look historically, you could say, well, then why were they so useful in the old West?

Because we were mining it back then. Like, like in, in In, in the gold rushes and stuff like that, you know, it was, it was in people's evoked set of wealth. Right. And it had a corollaries in the historic context, right? Like [00:33:00] there was no competitor to it. Gold hasn't had a great competitor in a very, very long time.

Now it has one, and it's just one that is almost comically better than it. Like it is, it is joke levels better than gold. Gold or bullets, but, but again, you know, bullets, I'm not saying bullets don't matter. Bullets matter. You want to store wealth. I'm just saying, if you want to start for the, the vast majority of societal collapse scenarios, it's, it's crypto and bullets.

It's not other s**t. Now, now there's other stuff you can do. Phosphates, advanced semiconductors. There's some other things that might be worth storing value and just not. Precious metals.

Simone Collins: Well, I also think that when you get to weird stuff like that, even bullets the risk of counterfeiting, if you're not really careful is higher, right?

So then that's just one other thing to consider.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, here's something I'd ask if you, if you're wondering [00:34:00] why I think gold has such low value, imagine society has collapsed. Somebody comes to you, the f*****g car full of gold and they want to trade it for your guns or your food or your semiconductors or your.

Are you actually going to take that as trade? Do you actually think that there's somebody else out there who's going to take that in exchange for s**t that you need? Or are you going to say, Hey, I noticed you have a gun in your car. Can you give me that? I noticed you have a hoe in your car. Can you give me that?

I noticed you have a shovel in your car. Can you give me that? I noticed you have some horses or some chickens. Can you give me that? F*****g of course! Like common sense, man. I don't know.

Simone Collins: Well, that's your opinion. And that's my opinion. And I'm sure we're going to get a lot of other opinions in the comments, but fun to talk about it.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We also have no idea how much gold there is in the world. And that's another thing that's important. No, like we know how much Bitcoin there is in the world. We have no f*****g clue how much [00:35:00] gold

Simone Collins: there is. Well, and how,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, No, what I mean is we don't know if there's gold in Fort Knox.

Simone Collins: Oh, I see.

Right. It's actually

Malcolm Collins: there. We don't know if there's gold in a lot of the banks. Some of them are audited. Some of them are not.

Simone Collins: That's true. I forgot about that. Yeah, not, not, you didn't even mean in the earth. You just meant that, that people say they have.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like that's, that's a weird thing about that asset class that we just don't know.

Now, realistically, if it turns out that like a bunch of gold that we thought existed in the world doesn't exist, it would increase the value of all other gold, but you're not going to find that out. And the fact that people can lie about this so easily devalues gold over time as institutions are more and more willing to lie to the public, which I think is the world that we're entering.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in general low trust world. Potentially dangerous world, corrupt world, that coin plus [00:36:00] crypto equals promising. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love you Simone. I love you too, gorgeous.

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