Ep 200: Where is the price of Bitcoin going after the Halving? with Bob Burnett

So if we fast forward four years, where are we going to be? You know, I would say it's highly likely that we are approaching one order of magnitude movement. So based on what I said, so about 10x which would put us in the 6 to $700,000 per bitcoin range.

Welcome to the Next level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's 200th episode, we welcome back Bob Burnett. Bob is the founder and CEO of Barefoot Mining, a company focused on the development of horse class mining sites. And he is a vocal proponent for the expansion of diversity in bitcoin mining site geography, scale and energy sources. Bob has spent over 35 years as a technologist, including 13 years at Gateway, a Fortune 200 personal computer company. You guys may remember the Gateway cows where he led the company's product development efforts as chief technical officer. Bob also founded and manages the Barefoot Bitcoin Fund. He serves on the board of directors for Ocean, a company focused on transparency and decentralization of bitcoin mining pools, and is on the board of advisors for the Satoshi Action Fund. He founded several companies in the bitcoin mining space and is an evangelist and educator for bitcoin and it's important to the world's future. He has eight US Patents, a degree in computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and today he's going to share his knowledge on what is the bitcoin having, what he predicts the price to be in the future, and how bitcoin is going to become integrated into the currency of the world. Bob, welcome back to the show.

Hi, Chris. Great to see you, man.

Oh, great to see you too. You join the elite ranks of only a few guests who have been on the show three times. And I know I gave a short intro here before we started, but if you. If you'd like to hear Bob, he was on episodes 83 as well as 89, talking a little bit about the background of bitcoin. But we're excited to have you back on Bob because we're recording before the having. But when this airs next week, it'll be just after the bitcoin halving occurred. Here, before we jump in, if you don't mind giving the audience just, just a little bit about your background and some of the things you've been involved with in the bitcoin world.

Sure. Well, I'll go back to the. Before Bitcoin where I was the chief technical officer at Gateway, the personal computer company. So my roots are really in computer design and I spent a couple decades doing that. I entered into this world of bitcoin in 2017 and have been running a series of mining companies. The parent operating company is called Barefoot Mining and we operate sites all over the country. And we're actually looking at trying to expand outside the US borders right now as well. And we focus on small to medium sized commercial sites. So within the bitcoin world, you can mine as an individual in your garage. You can be what I call an elephant, which would be hundreds of megawatts type sizes. That, that's kind of the mining that gets a lot of fanfare because there are several public companies doing that. But we kind of sit in this niche in the private side, privately held companies mining at small commercial sites.

Yeah. You call those. Was it wild horse operations? Horses, yeah. Horses, yeah. Horses, yeah. And I, I'll never forget our first conversation. We were sitting at the evening before a mastermind got started. We started talking about Austrian economics and I couldn't help but think about you yesterday because a video went viral and it was an MMA fighter. And in his little victory speech he said, and I can't, I'm not going to repeat it exactly, because we try to be professional and family friendly on the show. But he said, Reed Ludwig van Mises mfers is what he said.

Yes.

I had to laugh because it reminded me of me and you sitting there late at night chatting about Austrian economics, which, you know, maybe, maybe isn't the first thing a lot of people would, would talk about over a drink, but it certainly is what I enjoy.

Yeah, you know, that's, I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's a material event and I think what's happening is there's an awareness that the school of economic thought that has predominantly been in charge of economies for the last century is failing. It's failing at least a lot of people and eyes are being opened. And so that's a material event. I, I mean, in my mind I. It shocked me, obviously, but it's like another event that's happened since we've talked the last, is that Argentina has elected a president founded. You know, he comes, he's A professor of economics, and he, he's an Austrian as well. And so this, this concept of sound money, of keeping governments out of money, of keeping governments small, all those sort of things are. I mean, it's wonderful for me because. Because I come from that school of thought. And it's actually cool for bitcoin because bitcoin is founded on these same principles.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, check out episodes 83 and 89 to learn a little bit more about that. Bob goes. Bob and I talked about in detail about that, but I think, you know, something that, look, this has been kind of a wild year for bitcoin. And, you know, it's, you know, it goes up and down from time to time, but we've, we've seen it rapidly rise this year. And you know, going back, if you look at different patterns, there's been, there's been this pattern around havings. And if, if you wouldn't mind, Bob, share with the audience a little bit of that. What. What is a bitcoin having? And, and feel free to correct me. I've seen it happening. And as well as having, I just want to make sure I'm. I'm getting that technically accurate. But if you don't mind sharing a little bit about what that is and, and why it's actually significant.

Sure. Both terms are acceptable, by the way. Having and having. I, I tend toward having, but, you know, either is fine. So what is the having? Well, bitcoin has a fixed money supply. It's 21 million. And the way in which that issuance occurs is controlled through the havings. So on a technical basis, every time a block gets issued, which is about every 10 minutes, a little bit of bitcoin gets added into the money supply. It means it kind of. You can think of it as all 21 is already created, but we're kind of releasing it into circulation would probably be a way to visualize it. And so as we sit here today, that's six and a quarter Bitcoin every 10 minutes that comes in.

Right.

That works out, by the way. Like, currently, that means the money supply is inflating at about 1.6% annually, if you do all that math. So it's a pretty low rate. Now, what happened is because the having occurs every 210,000 blocks, we started going back to the beginning in 2009, issuing 50 Bitcoin per block, rough in that 210,000 blocks. Blocks takes roughly four years. So we've had three havings thus far. That gets us to the six and a quarter 50 to 25 to 12 and a half to six and a quarter. Now we're, as you said, we're five days away roughly from that number being cut to 3.125. That will drop the inflation rate to 0.8%.

Right.

So, so the monetary inflation, which we talked about, Austrians already, if you talk to Keynesians or MMT guys, they'll typically define inflation more like price inflation, this basket of goods, cpi, producer Price index. Austrians say no, that's all a side effect that it inflation is the expansion of, of the money money supply period. And so Bitcoin follows that and just says, hey, we're, we're marching towards 0% inflation. Right. And we're interestingly in Bitcoin, we're essentially after this having, you could almost say we're there, right. We're at 0.8%. And so there's not, there's not much gas left in the tank there in terms of monetary expansion.

Yeah, very low. So I mean, and you know, to your point, you know, we talked, talked about this before, but for, for Keynesians, basically, you know, the, the government controls the money supply and they, they can manipulate things up and down. And then the government measures price inflation based on this basket of goods. That. There's a number of flaws with that. But you know, one of the things that, I don't know if everybody realizes that, but the government controls that basket of goods and they control the basket of goods that they measure and then they also control the weighting that they put into that basket of goods. So this, this 2% metric that the government, at least the United States says that they're targeting isn't necessarily actually 2%. When you look at the, the inflation across the basket of goods. And a couple years ago we were talking, I mean, real, real inflation was more like 15%. It was almost twice what the government was saying. It is that accurate?

Yeah, it is. And I know, you know, a lot of your folks are for instance, real estate investors. So yeah, you know that, that asset inflation is part of inflation. And I think what you'll find is if you start taking those metrics, how much is the stock market up? How much is the price of fine brandy or, or whiskey? What, what is the price of homes? Those things are, are really reflective of inflation. And you know, probably a lot of the folks in your, that follow this podcast and follow some of the things you teach, basically, if I were looking at it as an Austrian, what I would say is what you are doing is you're investing in these Assets that are advantaged relative to inflation. And so you're, you know, you're, you're kind of one step ahead of the game, but it's always chasing you. Right. You know, you're, you know, that's what you're doing is you're investing to stay one step ahead of that whole process. The other thing, I don't want to go too deep probably because it's not today's theme. But other thing I'll say is if you think about it, what the policy we have, it's always backward looking. So what's happening is like you'll hear Powell when he goes on the media say, well you know, we're waiting for the data to tell us what to do. Well, so he's waiting for data from the past to tell him about what action he's going to take. So it's purely reactionary. Part of what bitcoin does is it says, hey, I can tell you exactly what the issuance is today, but I could actually tell you exactly what the issuance will be. You know, pick a date. October 1st, the year 2071. I could, in five minutes I could tell you exactly what the money supply will look like on that day. So that's a pretty radical change. And we don't need Powell or somebody driving the bus because we know where we're going.

Yeah, and you can't even do that with gold. And you know, there's some similarities between bitcoin and gold, but you brought up a good point. When is the last bitcoin set to be mined? Approximately.

About 2138 is my estimate.

2138?

Yeah. Some people say 2140. But as I said, it's. Bitcoin is actually not time based, it's block based. So when will that block come? But, yeah, but effectively so we, when we hit the. Having 93¾ percent of all the bitcoin will already be in circulation.

This week.

Yeah, this week. Yeah. So we will be working toward the last. What would that be? Six and a quarter percent over for over a century.

Yeah. That's pretty amazing. So, so a couple things. I know there's, there's various metrics of this out there that, that 21 million that's set to be. There's a significant percentage of those bitcoin that are assumed to have been been lost forever. It approximately what percentage of that in.

There's different estimates. Two to four million.

Two to four million. Okay. Yeah, gotcha. It's like 10 to 20%. Which again that's still, you know, that, that's kind of irrelevant in a lot of ways with respect to how Bitcoin operates out there. Is that accurate?

Well, I think as it gets utilized more, that does effectively increase the scarcity. If it's really, if it really is lost.

Yeah.

The interesting thing is we, we can only estimate the loss because we don't really know.

Right.

What we know is there's a whole bunch of Bitcoin, for instance, that hasn't moved for a decade or more. And so a lot of people assume that to be lost. Right.

But we just saw some a couple weeks ago that just, that hadn't moved since almost inception. It just, it just started trading. Right.

Yeah, that's, yeah, that's why I say we have to be a little cautious with it. So I, in the back of my head, I know that number and I think about that number, but whenever I'm doing any sort of long term planning or, or, or you know, price analysis or things like that, I'm looking at the 21 and I just, I assume it's all there. By the way, roughly a million of those are satoshis. Who's the creator? And we, we, you know, those haven't moved either. So it, it seems pretty certain that at a minimum those aren't going to move. Yeah, but again, I don't, you know, it's almost like a cherry on top of this ice cream sundae.

Yeah, I like that. Okay, so a couple topics. One, you know, Bitcoin miners today are rewarded with those, that, those bitcoin, those blocks of Bitcoin or those Bitcoin when they issue a block, when all the bitcoin are, are mined. What, what, how is the system going to perform at that point for, for listeners that aren't familiar with it because you know, it's like, hey, we're going to mine it, we're going to get rewarded for that. Is the reward goes down or it's eliminated.

Wh.

Why is there an incentive for the system to work?

Well, there's a second piece of the miner. It's actually literally called the block reward. There are two pieces on a technical basis. This part we've been talking about, which issuance is called the subsidy.

Okay.

But there is a second piece which is a fee. So if I, let's say, want to send you one bitcoin, Chris, I, Yeah. Then I, I have to add a fee to it. You could think of it as a tip, an incentive, a bribe. You think about it, whatever it is you want. Because what happens Is at any point in time, like as we sit here today, I looked at this this morning. There's 150,000 bitcoin transactions waiting to get included in a block. You could think of it as like pending checks or pending credit card transactions. Okay. But we can only fit about 4,000 of them in any given block. So the miners, as they're choosing which transactions to pull from the one they got to put 4,4000 of 160,000. Well, what criteria are they going to use? Largely, it's not exclusively who's offering the most money to be in the next block. And obviously, you know, people with large transactions or urgent transactions put. Put a bigger tip in. So those fees also go to the miners. Now last year I do some advanced metrics on this. Last year the average block was six and a quarter of subsidy and 0.43 bitcoin of the fees. So. So you know that now when the having occurs, the point for three won't have.

Right.

In fact, my prediction, we probably don't have time to go into the details of it is my prediction is that bitcoin adoption basically is increasing at a radical level, that the, the number of transaction requests going into the network is going to skyrocket, and as a result, those fees are going to skyrocket. So four years from today, my model shows that when the next having occurs, the fees and the subsidy will be the same number, roughly one and a half bitcoin at that point.

Okay, yeah, and that, that makes sense. And like you said, it's going to skyrocket, specifically as a percentage of the fee versus the total subsidy fee.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense because the, what we call block space, which is, you know, basically the right to be in a block, it's finite much. It's interesting, Satoshi, when he designed bitcoin, not only is the 21 million finite, but the block space is finite too. So on an annual basis, There are about 53,000 blocks and each can hold about 4,000 transactions. That number can float a little bit, but there is a finite size limit. So that means there's a little over 200 million transactions the network can process annually. So as adoption goes up, the competition to be one of the 200 million selected on a given year will go up.

Yeah.

Now there are other ways. So. So I guess two conclusions. So one is, I have no concerns about what we call the security of the network because the, the miners, you know, we need money to keep running this process and mining the blocks. I have no concerns about there being enough money coming in, even if it once it's exclusively fee based. But number Two, if there's 8 billion people in the world, which there are, there's about 330 million companies in the world, but we can only do 200 million what I call base layer resolutions. That math doesn't work.

Right, Right.

So there's. Bitcoin has something called the, a lightning layer. It's called the layer two, which basically you could think about it as you move money out of the base layer into the lightning layer and then that layer can do way more transactions. And it's almost like if you withdraw a couple hundred dollars from the bank, that couple hundred dollars could be used back and forth between hundreds of people.

Right.

You know, and represent tens of thousands of dollars of economic activity before it gets returned to the base layer.

Yeah.

Right. So it's the same principle.

Yeah. Per. I love, I love how you described it that way. Yeah. And it's. Again, it's. That kind of brings me the next part of our discussion here. But you know, the bitcoin having, I think it's, it's an event, it's interesting. I'd like to talk about kind of the, kind of the price movement around that and, and actually let's stop, let's stop and talk about that before we talk about kind of, you know, the, the US dollar and bitcoin and, and its adoption around the world. So looking back, Bob, you know, I was looking at kind of the price movement around the havings. We've seen kind of this regular pattern where, you know, bitcoin will rise into the having after the having and it'll kind of like flatten out. It'll take this kind of S curve up, up and down. Is there significance to that? What do you see in, with respect to the pattern and you know, between now and four years from now, do you have a pricing model or anything based around that? Are you a high income business owner or professional earning 2,300,000 or even more a year, but still feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck? Are you comfortable working until you're 65 or 70 to retire, or do you want to achieve financial independence and live life on your own terms? Terms? You could join myself and Matt4 and learn how we both became financially dependent in our early 30s. We'll teach you how to make, keep and grow your money. Teaching you strategies to maximize your earnings, keep your income that you've earned through tax strategy and legal structures, and ultimately teach you how to grow it by determining your personal investing strategy as well as teach you how to analyze investments so you can grow your passive income income to the point to live life on your own terms. Our coaching clients reliably do this in seven years or less. To learn more, check out our coaching program at nextlevelincome.com forward/coaching. That's nextlevelincome.com forward/ coaching.

Yeah, if you look at price on a log scale. So if you plot this on a log scale, what you'll find is like real quickly, I, I, I've been studying this closely, so I have these numbers at the top of my head.

Yeah.

When the first having occurred, it occurred when Bitcoin was priced at $12. One year later it was 1200. So at 100x in one year, in the first cycle and then as you said, it dipped. Now did it dip because it ran out of gas because the having or some external event? I don't know. I mean, you could argue that second one occurred. Okay. Now when the second one occurred, the. So, so by the way, what it did is on a log scale, it went up two orders of magnitude, roughly from ten to a thousand.

Okay.

Right. And it did it in a year. The second halving, it went up one order of magnitude at 10x and it did it in one year and one quarter. And in the third it went up not quite one order of magnitude, about 0.8 on a log scale. And it did it in a year and a half. So what's, what's happening is as the havings are occurring, the reaction, the price reaction is lessening a little and taking a little longer to extend. Now that's three halvings. Is that really enough to make a firm conclusion? I don't know, but there's definitely something there. There's no doubt that by restricting the amount of new issuance that there's a definitive reaction to the market. Right. It's, it's a classic supply thing. And so what we've been having is.

Is this the, is that the stock flow model that they refer to as well, or is that, is that, well, something different?

It's part, yeah, yeah. Stock to flow. Now, you know, there's kind of two versions of stock to flow. Stock to flow, meaning if you look at any commodity, how, how much of it is consumed versus or, or how much of it is coming into the market relative to how much is already there. Now, in some commodities, let's say, like silver or gold, sometimes the commodity is also being consumed.

Right.

Or, you know, actually in most commodities that's happening. So there's a, there's a new issuance rates, but there's a usage rate. So even like gold and making electronics or things like that, some is kind of coming out. But in bitcoin that doesn't happen. Right. It's, it's more pure. So yeah, so that's a, that's a material portion of the impact. But it's the only commodity I know of other than the block space of bitcoin which as demand increases, there's no mechanism to increase supply. Like, like, like because every other business is set up. Right.

If you can upregulate it when, when.

The price goes up, you can, you know, even gold. You mentioned gold before.

Yeah.

Sometimes there's a lag factor. Right. So if gold is suddenly in high demand and it's up. Right. I mean gold's doing better. I'm sure you will see mining companies start to figure out how to crank out more gold. But to your point, if you look at the stock to flow model, well, gold's been mined for thousands and thousands of years. So you know, if they, if currently they're, they're mining at, at the rate that produces like one and a half percent increase in the supply annually. If they really crank, crank it up, can they get to two and a quarter or something like that? Probably, you know, but those are, that sets that upper threshold.

Yeah.

Versus I don't think of housing, let's say, you know, housing. Well, could, could, you know, could, could they crank it up from 2 or 3% expansion to 4 or 5 annually? Maybe they might be able to, to do that. But bitcoin, no, no matter what, even as demand's going up, the supply interest is actually going down.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Fascinating. So what is your model, what does your model predict when it comes to pricing? Because I've seen a lot of, you know, when you and I saw each other in. It was Miami at the bitcoin conference. I look forward to seeing you here hopefully in Nashville this year. In Nashville. But there's a lot of different talk. It's like, oh, people predict bitcoin to be 500,000. They look at the price of gold, they look at it as a percentage. I've seen a lot about like 1% of portfolios now that the ETFs are, are prevalent. That's another thing that, that's come into play since you and I spoke last. What do you take into account when you look at, at the future price of bitcoin compared to all These options that are out there.

Well, I'll start with, you know, the analysis we kind of reviewed there that I, I think first if we look at the next, it's harder, it's kind of interesting. It's harder to probably predict one to two years than it is to predict four or five.

Yeah, and I, let's. Yeah, and I like the, I look at the long term view. That's kind of how we look at our real estate, demographic trends and those sorts of things.

So if we look at that, so if we fast forward four years, where are we going to be? You know, I would say it's highly likely that we are approaching one order of magnitude movement. So based on so about 10x which would put us in the 6 to 700 thousand dollar per bitcoin range. So yeah, I mean that probably answers the question right there.

Good enough there. So yeah, so you know, we'll have some resources actually in our weekly newsletter that's, that's coming out here concomitantly with, with this podcast. You know, so again since, since you and I have been been speaking here, being on the podcast, we've seen rapid inflation, you know, in this country and you know, the price of bitcoin, at least in the United States is, is in, in US Dollars. What, what are your thoughts on. Because one of my big concerns, Bob, is what happens to the US Dollar? You know, do have, we, have we reached the point where it's, it stops becoming the reserve currency. How do you see Bitcoin flowing into the international monetary system? You know, you mentioned earlier that it's not, you know, Bitcoin itself isn't necessarily the most efficient means to complete transactions. We have the lightning network and those sorts of things. How do you see Bitcoin fitting in to transactions and currencies around the world?

I think to be competitive ultimately that people will either have to have a Bitcoin based economy or they will have to have a currency, a local currency based on bitcoin. That's reserved because if they don't. Are you familiar with Gresham's law, which is that.

Refresh my memory. I've heard of it, but I couldn't cite it off the top of my head.

Gresham's law basically says that, that the hardest money always wins. So it goes back to like in the late 1800s when there were periods where there were both gold coins and silver coins being issued. And what would happen is people, people would hold the gourd gold coins which were considered more scarce and they would Always spend the silver. And so there was no, basically none of the gold got into circulation, only the, the silver got into circulation. In other words, the, the and the gold started accumulating more value to relative more value because it was effectively getting scarcer. Well, I think the same thing happens and there are many factors I think pushing the world away from the US Dollar as a global reserve currency. And I think even as Americans, I think one of the things to realize is that the US not being the global reserve currency actually is probably in my mind a good thing, not a bad thing. Now I think there's a lot of patriotism, there's a lot of emotion surrounding it.

Yeah.

But it's actually done a lot of damage. And this might shock some people but there's, there's another effect in economics is called the Triffin Dilemma. And this is the Triffin Dilemma. The Triffin dilemma says whatever currency is acting as the global reserve currency must be a net exporter of money and importer of goods. And if you think about that one.

More time, must be a net exporter of money and a net importer of goods.

Yes it must. Because it is. To be the global reserve currency you ha, if you want other countries to use your currency, they got to get it, they got to get it right. Well how are they going to get it? The only way to get it is to sell you something. Well now if you think that through, go. Well when you look at let's say the, the, the erosion of the manufacturing base in the U.S. doesn't matter what industry, right?

Yeah.

Textiles, automotive, North Carolina here.

We've seen, we've seen it the past few decades. It's just totally decimated.

Yeah.

Textile industry. Yeah.

And the politicians will say oh it's the evil people in Southeast Asia or the Chinese or the, whatever, they undercut our prices or whatever. Well that's not exactly true. Did they undercut the prices? Yep, they did. Why did they undercut the prices? Fundamentally it's because we wanted them to use dollars. Well how do we expect them to get the dollars? They have to sell us something.

Yeah.

And how are they going to sell us something? I mean we, we were producing, you know, you could say we're self sufficient. We could at one point in time maybe we were. Whether that's energy or, or food or, or textiles or whatever. Well these other countries had to sell us stuff and I, I, I'll. Let me tell you a short story. So to, to, to, to exemplify this. So imagine a world where the, the, the world's been under, like this pandemic. Right. Okay. And all, all exports between all countries have been shut down.

I can imagine that.

Yeah. Now if, if that were the case, and the world starts to open up. Let's say you're the, the president of Peru, and during the pandemic, you know, your bridges started to fail and you had all these things in your infrastructure that started to crumble. So you realize, hey, we gotta, we gotta build this infrastructure for our people. So you don't have the expertise to do this, though. So you find a German firm that is an expert in this sort of stuff, and you want to hire them. Well, do the Germans want Peruvian pesos? No, they don't. They want, you know, and, and by the way, the, the Peruvians don't have any euros or German marks or whatever that is. Right. And so they don't have any way to get those. So you settle on the US Dollar as a mechanism for that. Well, Peru. So let's say you're going to need $10 billion. Well, the only way for Peru to get $10 billion is to sell something to the U.S. okay? So the president of Peru takes his best sales guy and he says, you know, what do we do? We grow a shitload of. Excuse me, it's all good. We grow all these potatoes, fly to the US and sell them a bunch of potatoes. So he flies around and he talks to Walmart and he talks to McDonald's or whatever, and they say, well, we already have all the potatoes we want. Why would we buy your potatoes?

They're cheaper. They're better. Cheaper.

Right, right. And he doesn't have an answer. So he flies back, tells the president, well, they don't want to buy any of our potatoes. They have all the potatoes they need. He goes, well, no, get back on the plane, go back. Go back there. You sell them potatoes at whatever price you need because we can't build the bridge and our people are going to revolt if we don't fix this. So he gets on the plane and basically says to all the buyers, what does it take? Okay, you know, you got to undercut all the Idaho and Wisconsin potatoes by 20%. So be it.

Right?

So they cut the deal.

Yeah.

Right. Now what happens? The folks in Idaho and Wisconsin that are growing all these potatoes are in an uproar. Those evil Peruvians have undercut us, and now our potatoes are rotting in the fields. And you know, and you know that I've. I've taken a few liberties to simplify the story, but that's that's the story of American manufacturing in the last century as we became the global reserve currency, a massive erosion of it. So it's a long winded way of saying now if you have a currency that's not the globe, it's not tied to any one country now what happens? You, you can now compete on the merits of, on a level playing field. And, and the US has massive resources. We have, oh yeah, a great labor force, we have rich farmlands, we have great technology. So we can, if, if we're not fighting our own dollar, we can compete.

I love that aspect. Yeah, that's a, that's a very optimistic view of seeing that and I think it's one that again, we don't hear very much about because like you said, we see it, you know, from. Oh, the politicians vilified that. I mean, you see it on both sides. Right. You see on, on both sides of the aisle when it comes to that sort of thing. Yeah. So it could be, it's, you know, it will be, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, you know, a lot of ways as we digitize the currency. So I guess as I look at it, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this, you know, we've heard about, you know, central digital currencies. Central, I'm sorry, central bank, digital currencies. Cb dc Right. I always mix those up. And you know, we hear politicians saying, no, no, no, not on my watch. And then we, you know, we see it being pushed in other, in other political circles. Do you see central central bank, digital currencies being tied to Bitcoin? Would that be a way to, to make this happen? Have essentially like a digital dollar tied to Bitcoin?

Ultimately, yes.

Okay.

I think that the major countries, the US and the EU and Japan and places like that are going to fight. I mean, they're going to.

Yeah.

Because, because even though what I, what I just told you is that story I told you is the logical end game, there's a pretty rough transition to get to that point.

Yeah.

And what it means is they lose the money printer. The money printer doesn't no longer exist.

And when the money, which means the government, you know, specifically the US government and the politicians lose control and lose power, a big chunk of power.

Massive. Right, yeah, yeah. They can't promise things. I mean, they, because then they can only pay for things in which there is an equivalent tax revenue. So it forces this honesty. So when, whether you're giving money to Ukraine or you're funding a Social program or building a bridge, whatever, you, you have to get the money from the people. And I think if people, when people start really understanding the cost to them of these different things, they will revolt as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

And yeah, so that's an ugly period. What I think happens geopolitically though is there will be places in the world, most likely smaller countries like El Salvador is already there. Right. But there's a new presidential candidate in Suriname right now who is a bitcoiner and she's running on a platform of hey, move the country to that platform, we'll see where Argentina lands. I think they're, you know, they're struggling a bit, but you know, so I think some of, from the top down level, you'll see some smaller countries. There'll also be a bottom up thing though where as people get involved with bitcoin, they disassociate themselves from, from the dollar based economy. So that's my personal goal. Like, like I, I'm not there, I'm not even close to there. But my goal is I do not wish to participate in that monetary system. So the more I can. Like even in our business, we're a bitcoin based business. Right. We are not that far away like in my business from we generate our revenue in bitcoin. I'm not that far away from being able to, let's say, pay my employees in bitcoin. There's a few people working on projects that would allow us to pay for our energy in bitcoin. So when those sort of things happen, then I disassociate from that system and it loses power.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, there's some positives like we talk, you know, we've had guests on the show talk about the blockchain and being able to transact and transfer property and those sorts of things and a lot of efficiencies that can occur. So I think there's, there's a lot of positives that can come from, from all these things. Sure, yeah, sure, absolutely. And we look forward to continuing that discussion as well, Bob. So, you know, we're recording this about four days before the having. This is going to come out a few days after the having. Bitcoin is right around $65,000 today. We shall see where it goes. But Bob, we appreciate your perspective on all these things and you know, your knowledge and background and thoughts on all the above.

Thank you, Chris. Always nice to talk to you.

Oh, always nice to talk to you as well, Bob. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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