Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Bitcoin crosses $100,000, your Bitcoin investment has exploded. You're looking at it and all you can see is how much it's worth in dollars. And so you send your buddy Guy a message and you say, when should I sell my bitcoin? And from the average person's perspective, I think what is the logical answer to that question is really difficult to understand because it requires a shift in the frame of what you think is worth measuring against. And the answer could not be simpler. You don't. You never sell a good money to get more of a bad money. But since that requires explicitly an explanation and a shift in framing, I think it's time for a guy's Take episode.
[00:00:56] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:01:19] What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. And this show is brought to you by Fold. I have been an incredibly long time user of Fold, and they are one of the most essential parts of my of being on a bitcoin standard. Basically right now they have very large gift cards, like $500, even $1,000 gift cards for significantly more percent back. So if you want to buy in bulk, especially for the holiday season, now is a fantastic time to do it. And apparently you get entered into winning a bunch of sats and you also get spins which allow you to win SATs. So not only are you getting a whole lot more sats back, but you're also entering into chances to win a lot more sats. The one of the notifications said it was 250,000, but honestly I've just been stacking like crazy. I've got my roundups running. I have got, I do gift cards constantly. I got my normal sats back just on my typical purchases. Fold is one of the best ways to basically replace your old crappy banking with one that literally has bitcoin at the center and lets you move in and out, buy, stack, roundup, dca, you name it, and even convert any of your paycheck or deposits straight to bitcoin. They are literally one of the best. And I have a referral link actually right down in the show notes that will get you 20,000 sats just for using my referral and then starting to use Fold. And it also gives me 10,000 sats. So it's actually a great way to support the show. Definitely. Check it out. All right, so I get this question A lot.
[00:03:10] Bitcoin is up. Bitcoin has gone up. I think they went up like 25%, 26% in a single month for the month of November 2024.
[00:03:21] And so many people have asked, I see posts. Should I sell my bitcoin? Is now the time? Robbie the Fire even posted this not too long ago. Is now the time to sell? And now I get the perspective. I do understand when people are trying to frame it in their minds as to what they're doing. They think they are buying something that's going to go up in price or go up in value and then they sell it when it's higher. But I want to argue today that that is the in. That is an incorrect view. That is a mistake. And the very simple answer of when should I sell my bitcoin Is never. But I want to explain in a lot more depth exactly why that is. Because it is not. It is a bit counterintuitive to start with and it is not the obvious answer. It is after you have a foundation to know what you are actually holding. If you understand Bitcoin, or at least you understand the role that Bitcoin plays. There's only so much that you can understand Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a never ending rabbit hole connected to a never ending number of things. But if you can understand its purpose and its highest value, what is it that gives money its value? You would know why that question doesn't make sense. So that's what we're going to try to do in today's guy's take.
[00:04:55] First, and the most important framing to have in your mind is that Bitcoin is better money.
[00:05:04] It's not an investment, it's not a stock, it's not a company, it's not an app, it's not fancy software.
[00:05:13] It is better designed independent digital money. And in fact it is the first of its kind when it comes to digital money.
[00:05:25] And to understand what the value of money is, why is it that money has value? And why is it specifically that Bitcoin has value and specifically has a value, has a use case that it can provide that can't be copied by a bunch of copycat cryptos? Essentially why is all crypto falling in value comparison to Bitcoin? And just so you know, it is for anybody who isn't aware, for any short periods of time you will find a meme coin or some stupid thing that announces centralized project, that announces a partnership or any other number of ridiculous news items or hype cycle or puff piece or whatever. And there will be some shitcoin that for a short span of time goes up in bitcoin terms, but across the board, for every single one of them on a long time frame, they all go down. Why is that? So let's actually start for a second with the crypto issue and why it is that you can't copy Bitcoin and why it is that all of these other cryptos are necessarily and basically inevitably going to continue to fall in relation to the value of Bitcoin. And the first thing to understand is that the value of a money, the value and capacity of something to be money, is built on the trust in its validation, the trust in the properties that make it a good money. What makes it scarce, what makes it proof provable that you own a thing, you own part of it. This is why gold and monetary metals became the de facto standard across the world. It had all of the best properties so that you could own it and know that you owned it.
[00:07:24] That it could be the counterparty, it could be the other half of every transaction. It was itself able to carry the value. It could not be counterfeited, or at least it was extremely difficult to counterfeit. And it could be broken down in very tiny amounts or aggregated into very large amounts. And it was essentially able to be treated as, and to work as a collective accounting system. One where you couldn't change the accounting system and I could not change the accounting system. The only way to alter the ownership, the ledger of ownership of this accounting system was to voluntarily trade. Now, obviously there's stealing and fraud and all of those things, but those are external to the system. You cannot steal or fraud silver. Silver is still silver. You cannot steal or fraud gold. Gold is still gold. Now you can be defrauded. Somebody can say something is gold that isn't gold, or they can plate something in gold. But if you check it, if it is gold, it has those properties. It is the element of gold and it is scarce and there is no changing that. Money is a collective accounting system. It is a collective record keeping system that is able to hold value, that is just reflected from all of the other stuff in society.
[00:08:52] Money doesn't do anything. And I know, I've talked about this a lot on the show, but just because I know we've got, we always got new people and bitcoin is going crazy right now, so probably more new people than usual. Money is not a production good. It is not consumable. All it does, its entire existence, its entire purpose is to exist unchanged, is to Go through my hands and then your hands and then the next person's and the next person's and the next person's all the way back around to me, probably at some point, over and over and over again without being changed, without degrading, while it can be broken up or added together where it is consistent and uniform across any amount of it, and that every single person's relationship to its existence is exactly the same.
[00:09:43] Every money that has done that better than the previous money has outperformed the previous era of money, has demonetized the previous one. Every single time a hard money and a soft money and easy to create a less scarce money existed in the same economic system, all of the less scarce, all of the softer monies were demonetized.
[00:10:12] The reason no crypto is going to replace Bitcoin is because almost every single one of them is trying to be some singular arbitrary utility of smart contracts, or we've got more transactions or our blockchain has bananas or whatever stupid thing, whatever excess utility they're literally trying to get it to do something other than be money, when the inherent value is derived from must start at the trust in your ability to own it. And the trust that it will not change, that its characteristics, its defined monetary policy, the things that makes it a monetary system, those elements will not be altered and that cannot be copied.
[00:11:04] It is the trust and the understanding that Bitcoin will not be copied, that it is an uncopyable network that specifically gives it value, and the fact that it doesn't have a whole bunch of other arbitrary use cases actually makes it better as a money. Think about it. Money is supposed to be the universal measuring tool. It's a value weighing system.
[00:11:33] Think about it like a weight standard, right? Is you have this 1kg standard weight and you compare it against everything. The reason it's useful to say, you know, a bowling ball is heavier than a banana and that it's actually true. And that when you make decisions about how to engineer something or what to build some table or bowling alley out of, you can take into account those realities and they will mean something real in the real world. Because those weights are actually usefully comparative. That is because the standard, the relationship between the standard and the banana and the standard and the bowling ball is exactly the same. Now imagine that for some reason the unit of standard that we have is magnetic. And anything that is magnetic is actually repelled by the standard. And it can never be weighed. It's always weighs like 50% of the weight or something. I know Visually it doesn't quite make sense, but just for understanding the fact that it does something else other than just be a weight. But say the fact that something is magnetic drastically alters the accuracy of its comparison to some other thing. So a bowling ball made out of a certain material, even though it's as heavy as a normal bowling ball, appears to weigh the same as a banana. Well, that would be a bad standard. That would be a bad standard, specifically in relation to all of the things that have this magnetic or this individual property that makes the weighting system treat it differently.
[00:13:24] That's gold and electronics and jewelry. Things in which gold actually has a utility for outside of money. Granted, jewelry is a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy because if gold was cheap and not valuable, well then people wouldn't want jewelry made out of gold. So that's a little bit of a circular logic on why it's valuable for that. It's not really a utility, it's, it's a display of wealth. So jewelry is not the best example, but electronics is the better example. Because you know, Peter Schiff will always say it's like, oh, you can use it in electronics. It's it, you can, it conducts electricity, it's very malleable. Well, anything that actually has a measurable market, like a market that is useful enough to use up the gold in some non monetary capacity, actually makes gold bad money in order for weighing that individual utility. The money isn't the same because you could use up the money. In only this one industry would the money actually be used up. Whereas in all of the other industries, money's weighting, money's weighing of all of those other industries are specifically in a relationship where gold is not used up. Therefore the money is not the same in relation to this one industry where it has a utility or a non monetary utility, specifically some sort of consumable or industrial utility. And what's funny is we know that that's not why gold has value, because that's not what gold is used for. What's gold used for? It's melted into coins and bars, into standardized units and it's locked away into safes and bunkers and vaults all around the world. Gold is used as a record keeping system, as an independent place to hold value that is not subject to some ruler or government or some other third party or a custodian, whatever it is. And it out prices every other utility of gold. The element. And the reason is, is because that is its most valuable utility. So going back to Bitcoin's Relationship to crypto. The reason I have absolutely no, I guess concern is not really the word, the word for it. Like I just don't even have any interest in all of these crypto tokens and other blockchains. And all of these things is actually threefold. One is because every one of them, every time I've ever heard a pitch for any of them, they do not understand why money has value. It's all treated like VC startups, like they're making a Silicon Valley company or platform or something. And immediately they are setting themselves up to not be the independent network, an independent record keeping system that is explicitly the highest value use case of a. Of anything that is a monetary good. They are all digital and they are all necessarily backed by nothing except through some third party counterparty. Which means that the only value that it can actually hold independently is monetary premium. Which means if it needs partnerships and it needs a strong vibrant community on Discord and everybody needs to keep up with what's happening with it and all the new glacier updates and huge changes to the network, you're killing everything that makes it valuable as a money. Because now people have to. They're wondering who they have to trust. They're wondering if this startup is going to grow. They're wondering who institutes the changes. They're wondering where the community is that they have to keep up with in order to make sure they get the newest updates. Practically every project goes out of their way to be a trusted third party. Because a trusted third party is easy to point to and easy to show growth with and easy to make agreements with. Centralization moves faster, it's easier and it looks better. It looks like something that's easy to define. Decentralization is vague. It's difficult. It's very poorly defined as far as like a thing in and of itself. Like, try to tell a story about a decentralized network. You can't. You need one character character. You need a hero, you need a character arc and a very specific plot. And if the end of the plot doesn't relate to the beginning of the plot and the end of the character arc isn't related to the problem that the character was trying to overcome at the beginning, it doesn't make any sense. Humans think in centralized entities, in centralized ideas. Funny enough, therein lies exactly why a decentralized network that is actually radically independent and radically neutral is so astonishingly valuable. Because it prevents conflict and enables consensus against people who cannot naturally do it anyway. Essentially all crypto is centralized on purpose in order to be Something that they can easily point to and that they can relate to people. What they want to do is be able to point to something and say, look, this is trustworthy, which is exactly what we do with the banks, which is exactly what we do with the governments. We say, this is a trustworthy government, this is an untrustworthy government. But both are explicitly trusted third parties. Bitcoin's value is explicitly that there is no one person, no one group, no one company, nobody to actually point at. We're all just kind of yelling at the clouds and demanding somebody else do something or fix something or whatever. All of the crypto space deliberately and clearly eschews the very idea because it's so unbelievably difficult. Centralized is easy to upgrade. In fact, easy to upgrade basically means centralized. And if you're not clear or it's not visibly obvious where the centralization is, if it's easy to upgrade and easy to change, like fundamentally at the base layer, then you're simply not seeing it. But it is there.
[00:19:38] And another reason, and I'm not going to stay on crypto the whole time, but it's just important to hit these, in my opinion, is that crypto is specifically a mindset of diversification. And in a game of money, diversifiers always lose necessarily. So Bitcoin is. Bitcoin has an incredibly strong dominant, like, this is the money. And everything that we build, of any consequence will be built on top of this. Because this is the trust layer. Everybody I know in Ethereum has a whole bunch of other tokens and they trade and they do all sorts of mess. They explicitly dilute themselves because they think of these things as a bunch of stocks and a bunch of companies that they're going to spread out. I use bitcoin as my money. I do not dilute anything. I don't, I don't want to use fiat. I don't want anything. I want the best money that is most trusted and has the, the, the Lindy effect that suggests it's going to be around for a very, very long time and that nobody can corrupt and change out from underneath me, that is Bitcoin. And on that metric, nothing compares. If there is one group of people who will go all in on thing A and they eschew all other B, C and D as ridiculous, unnecessary and beside the point. And then there are people who think B is better than A, but diversify in B, C and D because they're not 100% sure who the winner is. And all of these have really cool Little tricks and things. A wins by default. The intolerant minority will make the consensus network that is dominant. And then lastly, the thing that makes bitcoin so valuable, that makes bitcoin revolutionary is its resistance to replicability.
[00:21:25] The act of copying it and making a new token immediately makes that token and that network a derivative. It's actually a demonstration of the opposite principle that bitcoin instantiates. And this is why there's like 20 million tokens or something ridiculous like that 5 million, I don't know, somewhere, somewhere in the mini of millions. Because who cares? That's why none of them dilute bitcoin, because nobody cares. They're all copycats. They're all just trying to be startups. They all just want to create a token. They just want to create a fart coin for free and then sell it and make a million dollars. If you want to really dig deeper into this idea, I suggest only the strong survive. Knuts infinity divided by 21 million. And maybe Szabo's shelling out, these could be good ones to kind of get like a strong foundation of these ideas and why crypto is basically not in the game. They are playing a completely different. They are tokenizing and trying to put tradfi on a blockchain, which specifically means they are trying to recreate the trusted third parties, the businesses of the stock market, and they're just trying to move it into this token economy.
[00:22:45] Now let's go back to the idea of better money when it comes to trust, when it comes to the reliability and the, as I like to say, radical neutrality of the bitcoin network and of sound money, that is the utility, that is the value that a sound money provides. It's really important to understand why our current monetary system and our current fiat monies are actually really, really bad at their job.
[00:23:21] Money is supposed to be a weighing system. It's supposed to allow us to compare the value of one thing against another. And value specifically is subjective, which means that the only way to actually determine the value of something is with a skin in the game choice. There is no way. You cannot poll people and say, which do you find more valuable? And get accurate answers, because that's not a skin in the game. Decision polls end up being in the social dynamic. You'll get answers that far more likely align with what's politically relevant or what the social signal of their friends want them to do. And you'll even get that in the economic realm quite often. But the explicit skin in the game will drastically alter the Honesty in the transaction, the honesty in the assessment of what is valuable. This is exactly why you'll see tweets and people say all the time, I bet you a million dollars that this, this, and this. But if you ask them to actually put the money on the table, they wouldn't do it even if they had. If you say, oh, well, why don't you just bet $100, most of them won't do it. What we say and what we actually do, especially when it comes to the genuine economic weight of it, is almost always very different. That is the power of skin in the game decisions. That is the power of the, the give a shit matrix, which I have a two sats on and I'll link to it in the show notes if you want to understand that. But it's the hierarchy. It's the matrix where on the X axis you have how much you care about the cost, on the Y axis you have how much you care about the results. And the only optimum in which we both care about the results and about the costs of something is when we are paying the cost with money that we earned and voluntarily trading for, and when we bear the burden of the cost itself. When we live in or eat or deal with the consequences of whatever that decision was. And that is when we are spending our money on ourselves.
[00:25:36] That is where you have real skin in the game choices. Now imagine that in this weighing system where people are trying to make skin in the game sacrifices to give up money in exchange for something, or to give up something in exchange something real in exchange for money, that there's somebody in this setup that can just make an infinite amount of money or get as much stuff that they want without actually bearing any cost whatsoever, without none of the economic weight of the cost, they would explicitly skew. They would explicitly throw misinformation into the market to the degree that they printed money, to the degree that they were altering or arbitrarily creating these units, because any decision that they made necessarily would not be an accurate weight of value, because value is only relative. If they are giving up nothing of value, then they are saying nothing about value with their trade. If it costs you absolutely nothing to say, yeah, sure, I'll spend a billion dollars to take a trip to Mars. And that costs you nothing. There's no cost. There's not even a social cost to it. You could just get it. Then the reflection of that choice tells us literally nothing about what it's actually valued at, because you don't know what you have no idea what the weight of a billion dollars is. The arbitrary inflation of a money supply is explicitly a place where completely valueless information about weighing, the understanding and trading of things of real value is being poured into the economy. And all of the activity is explicitly in the bottom left corner of the give a shit matrix. Again, I'll link you to the two sats short video. And I think it's a really good explanation. Now, how would you tell if our money was actually bad at giving us an idea of what was valuable?
[00:27:39] I mean, we weigh it with money. Like, if we didn't know that the kilogram standard was actually inaccurate when comparing a banana to a bowling ball, how would you be able to tell it is literally your standard? Well, most people don't. Most people have no idea. It's like a fish in water. So I did a little bit of math for. I'm doing a 2sats video along with this to try to make this idea a little bit more cohesive. But I pulled together in that. Pulled together in that video some charts. And what I did is I grabbed the historical records of the S&P 500, the median house value, and then the historical record of the money supply and charted these with each other. Because most people think the stock market is getting more and more valuable every year, and they literally use it. The political class, the counterfeit class, literally points to it as some metric, as some indicator of the growth and the value and standard and prosperity of society. The stock market is just equivalent to the world, to the country. And then the same thing with housing. Most people think that their houses are way, way more valuable than they used to be. Because I got it with, you know, my grandparents bought this house for $20,000 and now it's half a million dollars. And I've had conversations with people that I know who are very, very smart, who literally say, you can't. Inflation can't account for that.
[00:29:09] It's way more valuable, specifically because it's just more valuable. Inflation is just some of that. And all I can. It's so hard to get through the idea that, no, there is nothing that can account for that except inflation. There is no way for things to, relatively speaking, get 10 times more expensive without something else plummeting in relative price because the money supply can only be shifted from one thing to another. There's literally no way for something to be sustainably above the equal, like the market price for years and actually get sold. You can't sell something at a price for money for an amount that people don't have of money. Like you can't sell an iPhone for $30,000 because people don't have $30,000 for an iPhone. Only if the money supply grows can those prices start to actually be realistic. But it's actually much easier to see than that is. You just take the money supply. You don't look at cpi, you don't look at these stupid, vague, convoluted government metrics. It's very simple. What is the measure of how much money that we have in society? And the best thing that we have is the M2. Of course, they've changed it recently. Now it's the M2SL, but it's still roughly about as accurate as it can get. Still not super reliable, but it's the, it's the best we've got to work with. If you map it against the stock market and against the median household price, they're the same chart. If you match the scale and you put it in a logarithmic scale, they literally look identical. They're just the same. The lines are just. They just kind of bounce back and forth on the exact same trajectory. In fact, the house is actually worth less than it used to be in relationship to the money supply. And what's funny is most people can actually feel that most people know that to be true even though the price doesn't reflect it. And what do I mean by that? Well, I bet everybody who's listening to this has a grandmother or a parent who has a house from like a million years ago and they know that it's built 10 times better than the house that they live in today or the apartment building that they're in that is built out of cheap stuff that's going to degrade faster. Doesn't even have osb. My house literally does not even have OSB sheathing on it, which is a horrible. We're actually, we're taking off all the siding because we have to. It's old and crappy and we have to replace the windows anyway. And we're literally putting sheathing on the outside of the house because it's insane to have a stick built house without at least some sort of sheathing on the outside. It's literally like a cardboard, like a, like a, it's a, it's a board with a sort of like a house wrap on it. It's just awful. But the median house is actually pretty significantly below the monetary base. If you zero out the change in the money supply, the stock market just kind of goes above and below and bounces around. But it is flat the entire time. And housing has done that a couple of times as well. But it's mostly veered down. And I think it's because the quality and actual value, actual longevity of things built today are significantly less than things built 50, 60 years ago. They're literally just worth less. But we don't know it because the price is lying to us.
[00:32:36] That's the thing. The money is lying to us about what its value is. And when they print trillions of dollars, it all moves through one industry first.
[00:32:51] It moves through the stock market, through the banks, through the financial institutions, and through the legal and political system, which means that their relationship to money is nothing to do with our relationship to money. And it bloats those industries to two, three, five times larger than they ever would naturally be. And it creates this culture of speculation, of lobbying, of government contracts, of fake nonprofits that are just there to make people wealthy, of cheap money and just gambling and rent seeking on everything that we do. And it forces us to put money in the stock market that would never actually be there, because why, if we don't put it in housing or the stock market, it just plummets in value. But we don't see it that way because that's our standard of metric.
[00:33:47] We think the stocks are going up. We think the S and p grows by 7% every single year, but it doesn't. It stays the same. And our money is losing value. When we buy a house on a loan, what we're actually doing is shorting the dollar. That's why it's successful, because the dollar loses value all of the time.
[00:34:11] I bought this house for 150, the house that I am in for about 150, $160,000. Very modest, not. Not very good value. It was a mess. We had a lot of things to fix without any of the fixes being public, like on Zillow or whatever. Like, they don't know. They're not measuring the current price based on the fact that we've completely remodeled the kitchen, put in quartz countertops and custom cabinets. We tore out a wall and completely opened the space up. We've completely closed in the basement. We have dug out two more blocks worth of dirt, and we have put in cement downstairs. We have put in wal. I have remodeled the bathroom. We've put in new tile floors in the bathrooms. We have new showers. Like, we've done tons and tons of stuff to this house. None of that is being calculated. And this house is now today, just the normal estimate is it's like $380,000 seven years more than twice as much for no reason. All it is is a short against the dollar. What you were looking at is how much value the dollar has lost over that period of time. This house is not. Well, it is more valuable, but that estimate is not calculating any of that value. If we actually did an estimate based on what I've done to it, it'd probably be like 450 or more. And all you have to do to see that is make the change in the money supply your baseline and then chart against the S and P in the housing market and you realize that suddenly you're paying rent, you're paying a mortgage, you're giving all of your retirement to BlackRock and a bunch of rent seekers who are then gambling with it and speculating on the stock market and becoming this bloated culture of we own everything and all the money goes to us and we control it all. And they don't provide you a service.
[00:36:08] All they do, their entire industries are a system of rent seeking on top of the most important thing our money was just supposed to do by default, which is keep its value.
[00:36:23] Bitcoin is better money because you can't make more of it.
[00:36:29] It will just grow in value always on a long enough time frame. And all it has to do is keep being trustworthy money. And here's the kicker. It's supposed to just like we think the stock market goes up every year and housing goes up every year. Those things aren't supposed to go up every year. Money is. Those things are supposed to be more affordable.
[00:36:54] Everything in relationship in in relation to the money should get cheaper over time. Life should get easier. Why? Because if the money supply stays the same and society grows, the relative money price of any individual thing in society goes down.
[00:37:13] And all you have to do is think about it real simple. If there are 10 apples in the economy and that's all that there is to purchase and there are $10, well then the equilibrium price of those things is a dollar an apple. If we find a way to make 20 apples, well then they're all 50 cent sound. Money is supposed to increase in value indefinitely because it is the very metric. It is the very thing that reflects the fact that society is growing. And bitcoin is and will always be 21 million.
[00:37:45] Now here's a question. When people see that bitcoin went up to $100,000 and then like I want to sell it, I want to get rid of it. Specifically I want to lock in my profits because you're thinking about it like an investment. You're thinking this is a stock that went up in relation to some other stock. But that's not what it is. It is a money that is better in relation to another money in relation to fiat. And importantly, you are suggesting that you want to sell the better money in order to go back to the bad money. So I'll frame it like this.
[00:38:24] You have actually made billions measured in Venezuelan Bolivars by using dollars. Because that's an even worse money than the dollar is. If you look at the Venezuelan Bolivars to US dollar chart, it puts the Bitcoin chart to shame. You have made. So you've made thousands and thousands of percent in Venezuelan Bolivars. Why are you not selling your dollars to realize your profits in Bolivars?
[00:38:55] Simple answer. You don't sell a better money in order to get more of a worse money.
[00:39:03] Back to Bitcoin. Bitcoin will always be 21 million.
[00:39:08] Do you know how many dollars there are going to be in the next few years or in the next couple of decades?
[00:39:15] Well, let me put this into perspective because this is actually really easy to see, even though it sounds crazy. In 1975, the US debt, the US government debt was about half a trillion dollars, like 550 billion, which was huge. It was crazy at the time. 1985, 10 years later it's like 1.5 trillion. So three times that. 95, 10 years, 10 years after that, it's about 4, 4 point something trillion dollars. So a little over twice 2005, somewhere right around $8 trillion. Again, twice what it was in 95, 2015, right around $18 trillion. A little over twice what it was in 2005. And what is it now in 2024, one year before our 10 year mark? Well, it's right around $36 trillion, about twice what it was in 2015.
[00:40:12] And interestingly, Democrat, Republican, this, Congress, that, Congress, that House, whatever, didn't really change it.
[00:40:22] Mostly because this money is issued as debt and our debt explicitly cannot be paid off. There is no way to afford it because the debt is not constrained by the amount of money we have. It is literally issued into existence.
[00:40:42] This will continue until we default or we change the structure of our money completely. Which means that in 2035 the debt's probably going to be about 70 to 80 trillion dollars. And in 2045 it's probably going to be between 140 and 200 trillion dollars. And this is not a crazy guess.
[00:41:07] This is just the same trend projected forward on the conservative Side, actually, bitcoin will be 21 million.
[00:41:17] That alone, that alone suggests that it will be vastly higher in price simply because of the relationship to the falling value of the dollar. But I also bet that it will continue to monetize and people will continue to realize that it is better money and you just don't ever get rid of it because you don't sell good money to get more bad money. And if that happens, well, then it will be an order of magnitude on top of the value of on top of the growth, simply as a reflection of the loss in value of the dollar.
[00:41:54] So back to the foundational idea here.
[00:41:57] If a good money and bad money exist in the same economic networks on a long enough time frame, the good money will just continue to grow in value and the bad money will be demonetized. It simply will.
[00:42:12] Bitcoin has done nothing but grow in value. A lot of people point to the short term linear corrections, but if you look at it on a log chart, the picture for the dollar is very clear. And the picture for Bitcoin is very, very clear as well. Bitcoin only goes up in value and the dollar only goes down. Neither has done anything but short term corrections in the reverse of those fundamental trends.
[00:42:38] So the question of when should I sell my Bitcoin is the same as the question of when should I get rid of the thing that I own that always goes up in value in order to hold something that always goes down in value? And I think as soon as you frame the question properly, the answer is extremely obvious. You don't do that. So if your value in Bitcoin of what you hold has grown substantially and you want to use it for something, you want to better your life, or you want to invest in a project that's important to you, or do something you've always dreamed of doing, by all means do that. That is what money is meant for. That's the whole purpose of it, is to hold value and to sustain it into the future so that you can make better decisions and you can spend it at a later date. But understand that you are getting rid of something that is going to be more valuable. And that that trade off is very explicit with whatever other thing you are planning to do with it. And if it is still worth it to you, then do it. I spent a lot of my Bitcoin to start a family because I knew I would be more, I would be way sadder if in 10 years I had no family. As opposed to having less Bitcoin, I'm doing The same thing with Pear Drive and this show, to keep this alive during periods in which it's not making enough capital or investing in Pear Drive. Because I just so deeply want that project to exist. It's worth it to me because I just want it to exist. And I know what the trade off is and it's worth the risk for me. Therefore I am only putting value towards the things that are so high value that I know that even if it ends up in nothing but a loss, it was a gain. Because I had skin in the game. When I made that decision. I know what I gave up. But I do not sell my bitcoin. I am not selling it for more dollars. I am using it because it is my money and I choose to use the best money available to me. I will never sell it for more dollars for the same reason you do not sell diamonds for dog crap.
[00:44:58] The way you think about Bitcoin is choosing which money that is best to save in.
[00:45:07] And fiat cannot hold the best that fiat has to offer cannot hold a candle to the monetary assurances of bitcoin. It's not even close. It's not even a contest.
[00:45:21] So the answer to when should you sell your bitcoin? Never. When should you use it? When it's worth it to you to give up something that will always grow in value in order to do something in your life that is worth potentially losing it or taking a risk in order to make something even greater or more productive than you've ever had the opportunity to do at a different stage in your life or with a money that has been doing nothing but bleeding you out for your entire life.
[00:45:53] Money should always go up in value. Everything should always get cheaper because everything we do is to make the world better and to make and to be more productive. The only reason it's not happening is because our money is crap. It is trash.
[00:46:13] Bitcoin is better money.
[00:46:17] So shout out to fold. Actually fold. And the fold debit card is the freaking best way. So I have a savings account that's not actually like, it's just purely sats back that I get with my debit card and the gift cards that I use day to day because I'm on a bitcoin standard and fold is like the, like the premier tool for me to be able to live on a bitcoin standard and get in and out of the dollar network. But I have roundups. I have sats back on gift cards and I have sats back on everything that I swipe with my debit card. And just using it for the last two years. I have $7,400 ish worth of Bitcoin. It's about 8 million sats. 7,900,000 sats. And understand I did nothing. This is the power of the default. Every single thing that I do in fiat I am stacking sats with. I do not know of an easier, lower friction way to just constantly be saving in bitcoin and when it can actually amount to that much for the people who have access who can use it. I don't understand. I even have people in my family who know and have used it like here and there, but don't devote to it. I'm just like, you're missing such a golden opportunity. So anyway, I say this with complete sincerity. I have been a long, long time user of fold and I have an affiliate link down in the show notes that gives me 10,000 sats. So it's actually a way to support the show, but it also gives you 20,000 sats. So you basically get 20 bucks just for signing up. So check it out at the link. Thank you to everybody, to the audio nots who support the show. We will close this one out. I really appreciate it. Don't forget the resources. I'll have the link to the 2sats video and anything else that I mentioned earlier.
[00:48:02] Thank you guys. I will catch you on the next episode. Episode of Bitcoin Audible I am Guy Swan and until then everybody take it easy guys.
[00:48:26] There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world. There is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live. The sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words. Wait and hope.
[00:48:55] Alexandre Dumas the Count of Monte Cristo.