Jeremy Gardner: "You don’t suddenly educate billions of people on the virtues of libertarian values"

DEA recently said that initially, you know, the use case for bitcoin was buying drugs on the Internet and that was great.

Can you go into more detail about that?

There's no reason for people to actually buy and use bitcoin to buy drugs online.

How exactly?

I don't care about the price at all. It's just flabbergasting to me. But what I do think about is.

Yeah, seems reasonable.

Steven Spielberg does not choose the cameras that he uses. The porn industry does. I feel very ambiguous about porn. I'm not a huge fan of it. I'm not a huge fan of the porn industry.

Whatever. First things first. Jeremy, I just wanted to ask you to introduce yourself, like real, real brief. 30 seconds.

Sure. My name's Jeremy Gardner. I've been a serial entrepreneur in the blockchain space for, for about a half a decade. I first founded the Blockchain Education Network, which is a global educational nonprofit. Through that nonprofit I met my co founder of what would become Augur, Joey Krug. One of the first applications built on Ethereum, one of the very first ICOs ever, the first utility token. Then joined Blockchain Capital as an entrepreneur in residence where I founded Distributed Magazine and another software company called Sava. And then most recently I've launched my own impact investing fund called awesome Ventures.

I guess the first question that I have is can you give me some specifics as to what you start with in this education nonprofit that you run?

Well, so if you think about what the blockchain education was versus what it is today, it's very different things. Five years ago when the nonprofit started, there were no formal educational resources or no college courses. The academic research on bitcoin and blockchain technology was sparse. But there were young people that were hungry and eager to learn about this tech and to evangelize and advocate and build companies around it. And so what we had back especially in early 2014 was hundreds if not thousands of young people around the world, colleges, universities and high schools that wanted to self organize. And so what we created was a structure for young people to create their own bitcoin and blockchain clubs at these schools around the world. We started with bitcoin clubs at MIT, Stanford and the University of Michigan. But within three months we had over 100 chapters in 20 plus countries on every habitable continent. And back then it was really about self organization and educating one another about this tech because we were trying to create what I call generation blockchain, a generation of young people that are blockchain, I guess natives if you will, those that really understand the use cases behind cryptocurrency, having most of us played online games with digital currencies in them already, but also understanding these data oligopolies that are Facebook and, and Google that really harvest all of our data and sell it and exploit it, and realizing that there's a better system that can be afforded by blockchain tech. But fast forward to today, almost five years later, and it's a very different world. All of a sudden there are college professors teaching about this, there's a wealth of academic research and resources for young people that want to learn about this tech. And now it's really about focus on creating communities and bringing young people into this industry. So whether it's part partnering with startups to help students find jobs or organizing hackathons to bring young developers into this space, our kind of mission has changed as the ecosystem has evolved, which is something that you would want to have happen. If we were still having to go educate young people, it would say a lot about the state of this industry. But instead we actually have a robust number of resources that young people can now use.

Okay, so, okay, so that's sort of from the side of like building things and from the tech side of things, like, you know, you're trying to create these communities where like people can get more resources to maybe start a company, start a project, like the building side. Right. And you were making this distinction in the panel between like the masses and the people building things. And I guess I'm curious, can you walk me through, like, what is mass adoption from the other side of things? What does it look like? What does it mean?

So my point on the panel was that mass adoption has nothing to do with education. Mass adoption has to do with building products that people want. Mass adoption happens no other way. You don't suddenly educate hundreds of millions or billions of people on the virtues of decentralization and libertarian values that is going to make them want to use Bitcoin or use blockchain based applications. No, what you're going to do is you're going to create tools that people want in their lives that they don't have today. The reason why bitcoin was initially adopted, the reason why bitcoin and blockchain technology exist today, exists for primarily one reason and one reason only. And people don't like to say this, but it's because of the dark markets. There was no Silk Road. There was no reason for people to actually buy and use Bitcoin to buy drugs online. I'm not sure it would exist today. I think otherwise. It was just a libertarian cypherpunk thought experiment. It was only once individuals in the developed world actually had a purpose for acquiring these crypto tokens to exchange in commerce. Did Bitcoin really achieve meaningful value. Once people understood that Bitcoin allowed people to do something that they couldn't do before, we shouldn't have other examples in Cyprus, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, places that have had really awful hyperinflation. Places like India with demonetization, China with capital control, South Korea with capital controls. You know, the use cases have emerged. But initially, you know, the use case for Bitcoin was buying drugs on the Internet. And that was great, but it didn't actually have to do with the underlying ideological ethos that, you know, its earliest inherent had been attracted to. And that's going to be true with all blockchain technology. We're simply going to build tools that people want in order to get adoption. No ideology, no education about the virtues. You know, we can try to act like missionaries and spread the word like a religion, but it's not the best way to do things. As long as we build tech that people want, they will come and they will adopt this. Now maybe some of that underlying philosophy will be missing, but if you build your technology properly, that philosophy underlies the product that you're offering. And there will be this component of really radical decentralization and disintermediation and middlemen, which is what makes blockchain technology so revolutionary in the first place.

But to backtrack a little bit to the drug use case, it's just funny because I just talked to another panelist from today who agrees with you in that maybe it's an objective thing, but says the same thing that, you know, like the reason bitcoin first became popular and one of the main use cases is the dark web. Darknet?

Yeah, dark web.

Buying drugs. Well, that was like his, his main example, so. Or like being able to, I don't know, access. He also talked about porn and he was just like.

Or digital blackmail. Sure. Like there's all sorts of.

His argument is that we need to do something about, like that's a problem and we need to do something about it and we need to like outlaw or ban permissionless cryptocurrencies. Can you just speak to that comment?

Well, that is just beyond idiotic. First of all, the DEA recently said that, you know, the use cases of blockchain technology in cryptocurrencies or crypto assets in particular, has dropped from like 90% being black market to like 10% today. And it's only going to get lower because guess what? Blockchains are publicly transparent ledgers. Now look, there are privacy coins like zcash and Monero, but the onramps are still almost totally traceable. If you want to put $10 million into Monero, it's going to be very hard to do that in an obfuscated, discreet way. So if you want to do truly illicit things like finance terrorism, cryptocurrencies are a horrible way to do that. I don't know who you were talking to that's at this conference that was allowed to get on stage and say public blockchain should be banned. Because that's, I mean the whole value of public blockchains are these transparent, immutable, censorship resistant ledgers that allow for a open world of finance compared to the closed world of finance that we have today. I mean, look at what Credit Suisse did in Mexico. They literally made deposit boxes so cartels could fit massive boxes of cash into them. It's not like the current financial system is protecting us from organized crime and criminal activity. I mean, who's paid more in fines for fraud than anyone in history? I mean, it's J.P. morgan. It's not. These banks are not like a better system than today. HSBC was literally a bank designed for taking offshore Asian money and laundering it. I mean, the financial system today is much more culpable for things like terrorism and crime than blockchain technology perhaps ever will be. And so the idea that a public blockchain, something that we need to ban simply because it can be used for illegal activity, it's just flabbergasting to me. You know, it can be used for illegal activity and actually is used for illegal activity more than anything else in the world. USD$100 bills Benjamins. I mean more than 80% of black market activity is used with American hundred dollar bills. Should we go and ban the dollar? I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that. I mean, maybe I would because then bitcoin would go up, but come on, I mean that's just an absurd statement. I mean, look, bitcoin is digital cash or digital gold, whatever you want to call it. It is an online form of value. There's no different than the money systems that we have today. Besides the fact that it may be better. But to suggest that just because it can be used for bad things is absurd. Like do we ban Excel because human traffickers use it for their business? No, Technology is morally agnostic. It can be used for good and it can be used for evil. When I was thinking about launching a fund at the beginning of this year, end of last, one thing I decided was that I was going to launch a social impact fund. I was only going to invest in blockchain technology that makes the world better. And I think collectively as a community, whether you have that impact thesis or not, you should aim to invest in technology that makes the world better. Because blockchains are all about network effects. So if you invest in a technology that makes the world better and it's successful, it will do it at scale. And so we have a capacity to make a massive amount of positive impact in the world with this tech. And so to suggest that we should ban it to me is just mind boggling. I could never get behind such enough.

Just to go like, sort of stay within this topic of use cases, but back up a little bit because you were getting into like a very lofty, high minded space of doing good. And that's awesome. But I'm wondering about like something like, you know, pornhub using crypto.

Yeah.

That is that something that like you think is important or impactful or like what do you think is sort of behind that other than sort of a PR move for them? Because like one of the biggest things that's gonna attract people is just the sort of like sex sells rule. So is that sort of an adoption, like an inroad for adoption? Or is that just like a PR move that you think is stupid?

So I'm very biased here. I know the mind geek guys. I'm not a huge fan of the porn industry, but when they got in touch with me and told me that they wanted to get involved with this space, I was nothing short of thrilled. If you think about what the porn industry has done over the past two decades, when it comes to technology adoption, it's mind boggling. I mean they're the reasons why we used vhs, they're the reasons why we use DVD over Betamax. They have increased streaming capacity and the capacity of content delivery networks, more so than any other technology companies on the planet. Porn companies are technology companies. They have been radical innovators in the world of tech. Steven Spielberg does not choose the cameras that he uses. The porn industry does. The porn industry is such a massive catalyst for technology adoption. I could not be more thrilled that they're involved in this space, assuming that they are thoughtful about the businesses that they partner with. And you know, initially I wasn't exactly thrilled with some of the crypto tokens that they partnered with to integrate on their site. I think it was about pr, I think it was about money. But I spoke to some of mindgeek's management and without going into detail about what we said, I said, why don't you use this moment to be the arbiter of who's successful? You have the capacity to identify the very best blockchain technologies and show that they work to the world. And there's tremendous upside for them because almost any protocol they would adopt, they'd have to own the tokens. And if they show that this technology works, I mean, they're one of the largest content delivery networks on the planet. They show this tech works. Other content delivery networks that may not be in such a sketchy industry will adopt as well, and they'll see massive upside and increase of their holdings. And so look, I feel very ambiguous about porn. I'm not a huge fan of it. But their ability to be kind of thought leaders and trailblazers in this space is remarkable. And they have historically been in the world of tech and Internet technology and even cinematography. And so I'm not going to opine on whether they're good or bad for this industry yet. But I'm very hopeful that they can catalyze the adoption of blockchain tech at a rate that otherwise would not be possible. A lot of other industries are very nervous about adopting blockchain tech because it's so new, it's so cutting edge. They don't want to like piss off shareholders, the largest tech companies in the world. But guess what? Mindgeek's privately owned and they have more of a capacity to innovate and adopt new technology than a lot of the big publicly traded tech companies that are out there. So I'm hopeful. I think a lot of what they've done has been for press, I think it's been for money. But it doesn't mean they can't be a force for really increased adoption of this technology at a rate that we have not yet seen.

Who needs blockchain adoption? What does that mean that they need it? What are some of the sort of first again, I want to get to first steps and sort of more make it more concrete because it's one thing to have clubs on college campuses and stuff like that, and that's sort of like more short term and happening right now. That's awesome.

That's. Who needs to learn about blockchain technology.

Right?

And that's exactly. But who needs it is a different sense Right.

So who needs it? And also, you know, people throw around this term, the unbanked. That's like one of the biggest problems that we need to solve in the world. Can you go into more detail about that, like what you actually see happening?

So you partly answered your own question. It's the disenfranchised need blockchain technology. And when I say the disenfranchised, I mean a massive subset of the world's population. I mean, pretty much everyone except for me, like a white, middle class, heterosexual male that lives in the United States and lives in San Francisco, probably. Unless I want to buy drugs off the Internet, I literally have no really strong use cases. Maybe decentralized prediction markets are an exception for the 2 billion people in the world that have no access to traditional financial services. And the 4 billion that have limited access, that includes that initial 2. That's what this blockchain. That's what blockchain technology is made for. I mean, that's where we will see the real adoption. The ability to have a bank account in your pocket, to have something that is secure and safe in your pocket, cryptographically, in a way that money under your bed or behind your wall is not. That is revolutionary. And it affects the people that are dealing with predatory institutions, whether they're governments, whether they are financial services businesses, or, you know, governments that exploit their positions of power as middlemen to disenfranchise their consumers and their users. And because what blockchain technology affords is radical disintermediation, blockchain technology is the most radically disintermediating technology that's ever existed, in that if you want to transfer value, whether it's money, the title to your house, the rights to your land, you can now do it in a way that only requires a single counterparty, the person that's buying it from you. And that is a massive upgrade from the world that we live in today, in which there are all sorts of clearing houses and third party institutions that are necessitated due to a lack of lack of trust in transactions. But with blockchain technology, you can actually have trustless financial or value exchange. And thus, whether we're talking about land title insurance or real estate ownership, or just, or the security of someone's money, we finally have a tool that enables that to exist without these predatory institutions that have existed for decades or even centuries. So the people that blockchain technology is really going to change the lives of are those that are currently being exploited, the disenfranchised. Now, how do we get There it's not entirely clear. You know, there are remittance solutions today, trials today, about giving directly to folks such as this. But we've historically primarily been building blockchain technology for the people that need it most, you and me, people in the United States, people in the West. And that's not where blockchain technology is going to have its biggest impact. But first we need to be bringing in entrepreneurs from these places where they are disenfranchised, bringing in the disenfranchised and having them build products out of their own experiences that can be paired with technology companies in the west that are probably most well equipped to build this software and tech. But we need to include the people who have the most benefit from this technology. And we haven't done a great job of doing that yet.

Okay, and do you see that happening like really on a private scale or like, I'm just curious about how regulation is going to affect sort of like this process.

I mean, we've convinced regulators that blockchain technology is the holy grail of everything. I don't find the regulators to be any sort of hindrance on getting this tech adopted. Whether it's in the EU or the US or even Africa or East Asia, governments are getting behind trials with this technology to improve the lives of their people, and sometimes for more authoritarian purposes, such as distributed ledger based money in China and Russia. But overwhelmingly, governments have actually been massive catalysts for the adoption of trials with this technology. So I don't really think about regulators in this regard, but what I do think about is how do we reach the people that need this most and actually understand how this technology can help them. And that's just kind of a long term undertaking that will require the help of many governments and NGOs to really understand. Because entrepreneurs often have this problem, especially in this industry where they create solutions for problems that don't exist. What we have to do is be identifying problems and then seeing if a blockchain can help mitigate that problem. Generally the answer is no, but you have to take a problem first approach. Trying to build solutions without problems is probably the greatest fallacy of Silicon Valley and beyond.

What's your opinion about like government backed cryptocurrencies, for example? So we're kind of like, well, they're.

Gonna, they're gonna do them, but they're, but they're not cryptocurrencies in this traditional sense. They're distributed ledger based, centrally banked money. They're issued and monitored and controlled and validated by central Banks. I think there's a lot of good evidence to suggest that central bank issued cryptocurrency, crypto asset, or E money if you want to call it, actually would be better than the digital cash that we have today. But it is the antithesis of what we've been building in the blockchain space, cryptocurrency space so far. Because this is going to be incredibly Orwellian. They are going to see every transaction that's ever made. They're probably going to, there's going to be kyc and they're going to know who's making those transactions. And that in fact, in my view, will be the greatest catalyst for the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies as we know them today. Whether it's Bitcoin or something else. When there is government backed cryptocurrencies and we move to a cashless society in which there is no financial privacy in our daily financial transactions, that is when something like Bitcoin or stablecoin, but something that is not bank or government issued, that's when we'll see mass adoption, not before. You know, if Bitcoin were going to be mass adopted this decade, it would have happened five years ago, three years ago. But that's not, it's too volatile, it's too hard to use, it's too hard to understand. But when people are forced to use it because there's no longer cash, which is kind of the gray economy and a massive part of the global economy overall, once that economy disappears in its current form, without cash, which will happen over the next 50 to 70 years, that's when we'll see mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, decentralized cryptocurrencies as we know them today.

Okay, so wait, what's the motivation there? Like, I want to agree with you.

Because people want to use cash. People want to make financial transactions that the government doesn't know about, whether it's paying your babysitter or your illegal immigrant.

I think a lot of people, like really a lot of people care about that. I just feel like a lot of people don't care about privacy as much.

As literally almost every family in America pays their nanny in cash. And that nanny is not reporting it to the irs and they're not reporting it to the irs. I mean, this is not uncommon. That people don't want to do business in a way that is not being chased by the government or just want some privacy in their financial transactions. To virtually almost every person on the planet, the great economy is absolutely Massive. And the second you take away cash, it becomes much harder to engage in. Especially if we've moved to a distributed ledger based financial system where not only is every transaction that you make traceable, but it's also tied to your identity, which is way worse than what we have today. I mean, if I go and make an online payment today, you know, it's tied to my Venmo, but it's not really tied to me per se. It kind of is. But with a distributed ledger, it is entirely tied to me. And if I go make a transaction that's later used in some sort of crime, that can be tied back to me, which historically has not been true.

Right, right.

So you really have to think about the ramifications of a world in which there is no cash, no ability to take place in an informal economy. But that for sure will lead to the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.

Do you think that, like, the distinction that regulators tend to make between blockchain and cryptocurrency is kind of false? Or what's the relationship there? Like, do you have an opinion about what needs to happen with cryptocurrency regulation? You said blockchain regulation is pretty good. Like everyone's on board. Whatever.

Look, people don't really talk about cryptocurrencies anymore. We avoid talking about cryptocurrencies. It's all about the blockchain. I say let's keep it that way. You know, regulators, politicians, they only have so much time to learn about these subjects. So as long as we develop tech that is appealing to them and talk about it in a way that's appealing, we're fine. Now, obviously, there could be a moment when cryptocurrency somehow get villainized because they're used in some sort of awful attack or something that can't be ignored. But until that happens, let's just not talk about it. Let's not have that narrative. The narrative should be around why this technology is so overwhelmingly a force for good. We shouldn't ask for regulation that doesn't need to exist. We should only ask for regulation that makes things better. Like having, instead of having people get a money transmission license in every single state in the United States have a federal charter for money transmission. If I'm doing money transmission in Massachusetts, I probably also want to do in New Hampshire and New York. So let's make that easy. Those are the sorts of regulations we should strive for. That's what Coincenter is working on. But let's not go and demand regulation. The Things that we don't need regulation yet. We need a kind of an open sandbox for innovation before we're really ready for a lot of regulations. But there's certain areas, like securities laws, where it would be great if we could kind of amend them for the. For the reality of these tokenized securities, which are a very new concept.

Okay, how exactly?

Well, so you think about securities today, and one of the reasons why they're so heavily regulated is that they're not transparent. You don't have any insight into cash flow except for quarterly reports. But in theory, a lot of the use case for tokenized securities could be securities that pay automatically based off of the revenue of a software project. Like, I should be able to sell tokens for my software project. That every user, every transaction goes back to investors, like a portion of revenue, because that's transparent, it's immutable, it's on the blockchain. It's so incredibly clear that investors should know exactly what they're getting. And thus I shouldn't have to file an S1 and take a company public to offer that to your everyday consumer. People should be able to buy that and then ICO and gain access to the upside of this new software company that I'm building because it's so straightforward, how they get paid out, where the revenue or the dividends are coming from. You don't need to go and take a company public to do that. But right now, the way the law is written that if I were to give any sort of future revenue from the software to investors that are unaccredited, I'd be breaking the law. And that's dumb, right?

Yeah, there's just a lot more hoops to jump through. And the laws from the 1930s, right?

Yeah. You generally have to assume that a law that was written in the 1930s with regards to financial regulations is going to be at least partly outdated by 2018.

Yeah, seems reasonable to assume. Well, I still want to talk a little bit more about crypto, sort of like your personal opinions about it, not about regulation. Because like you, you own crypto. You've definitely said that publicly, right?

Yes. Yeah, Most of my money is in crypto.

Yeah. And you've done well for yourself. But. Okay, so I'm wondering about, like, there is the fact that governments, consumers, sort of like people on a mass scale, pay attention to crypto and blockchain, sort of because or in relation to its price, the price of bitcoin going up a lot in December. Got a lot of press. CNBC has Started reporting like crazy amount, you know, that kind of stuff to the mainstream media, etc. So there's a clear relationship there between at least like awareness and price. So I'm wondering about markets and things like, you know, last week or the week before last when the market again like dropped, and again you have all these headlines that are like, this is it, this is the end of crypto. Since you've been in it a long time, what do you say to that? Like, what's your.

You know, I was somewhere in the world, I was either in India or Greece when that happened. And I actually didn't learn about the drop in the market for like several days. I don't pay attention to the price. I kind of knew about it from following crypto Twitter that there had been a price drop. But people kind of speak about it ambiguously. I don't care about the price at all. Like, if there were any underlying investment fundamentals driving the price of crypto assets, I'd be concerned. Like, just like if Amazon stock went down 50% tomorrow, I'd be like, what the hell just happened? Like, that's really bad. Like there's something existential, existentially threatening one of the most important businesses in the world, or any equity for that matter, that I'm an investor in. Like, a drop of more than 10% or even 5% would be deeply alarming. But in crypto it's just, I mean, it's just hocus pocus. It's just totally sentiment driven. Nothing really drives the price increases or decreases besides just like FOMO sentiment irrationality in the market. I've got a hedge fund side of my venture fund and it's performing pretty abysmally right now because we don't trade. I don't try to time the market. What I do is I invest in crypto assets I believe are going to change the world. I just, I just don't pay attention.

You personally never trade?

No, I mean, look, the reason, like, you know, I've been in the industry since 2014. I wasn't that early. I didn't make my money in bitcoin. I made my money in other crypto assets a little bit in bitcoin. You know, even though I'm often lauded or labeled as a bitcoin millionaire, not really how I made my money. I invested in technology that I really believed in, whether it was ether or back then XRP at a much different price. And I just held them. I never thought about it, I never traded them. I never watched the Volatility I mean, this whole trader ethos that permeates industry is just flabbergasting to me because no one know how to trade this market. Because someone like me can go on to an exchange and you may have a short end based off of all these triangles and pyramids and all these different technical analyses that you're doing, I may decide that I really like a crypto asset and I may buy enough to move the price up 7% and that will totally clear your, annihilate your short. And it's because your technical analysis doesn't matter. These are illiquid markets. A single individual, a single fat finger trade can totally move the market against the way your, you know, your Elliot Wave analysis predicted it was gonna go. These are not like traditional financial markets, which are deeply liquid, which are based off of companies with really strong fundamentals, cash flow, P to E ratios. You don't have any of that here. What you have are very speculative commodities that are potentially going to change the world. But none of them are yet. Bitcoin maybe being the exception. So if you're not investing based off of a long term value proposition of a crypto asset or some really fantastic inside information about what that about an announcement around that crypto asset is, you're never gonna make money trading. You know, I met a lot of smart traders back in the fall of 2017. I don't know any of those guys today because guess what, they weren't actually that smart. You know, everyone was smart, everyone's smart in a bull market. But the guys that are smart in a bear market or downward market are the guys that actually have conviction in their investments. Now, I may go double down on some of my investments, but I'm surely not selling right now like many people are. But most people who bought crypto assets in the past year, they just bought it because, oh, I have a feeling this one's going to go up and now it's going down and they're selling. There's panic in the market and there's blood in the streets and I love it. I mean, I just get such masochistic joy. It's like, oh, my net worth is down 80%. But like, I'm not concerned because I know it's going to go up another 10,000 100,000% because the investments I've made are valuable. But paying attention to the markets, I mean, it's a massive failure on the part of our industry. Not to be more cynical about these price rises, I mean, if you look at my interviews Back in mid to late 2017, I was calling these ICOs insanity. I was calling the market insanity. It was irrational, it didn't make sense. And I even said in the New York Times, I was like, I'd be perfectly comfortable. The market crashed 90% today because this is unsustainable and it's driving greed and senseless kind of entrepreneurship. Businesses that don't actually work in the long term and hold this industry back because they're just a distraction.

What do you think about mainstream media's involvement in all of that?

I mean, can you blame them? You have the fastest appreciating asset class in history. Just roaring and turning 26 year olds like me into multi millionaires. It's a compelling narrative. You can't ignore it. I mean, there's never been an asset class like this that has enriched so many normal people. It's something that the news, of course, are going to latch onto because what does everyone want? Everyone wants to be rich overnight. Who wants to be a millionaire? Like, everybody wants to make money and they want to make it easily. And so there's this incredible new investment class that's turning average Joes into very wealthy people. They're going to report it. You just can't blame them. Now, do I wish they educated themselves more? Yes, but it's not their job. I mean, if you want to be educated on blockchain technology and crypto assets, you're gonna have to immerse yourself for 90% of your life, for the next six to 12 months of your life before you even have a baseline understanding of how this tech works and what its real purpose is and how it's used. And so to expect the mainstream media to be able to report this accurately is not particularly reasonable. Now, I wish they did a little bit better due diligence, but at the end of the day, you really cannot accept the media to do a very good job.

Okay, but I more mean like the effects of it.

I mean, they're totally. They're awful because they bring average Joes have no idea what they're investing in into this new asset class. I mean, like, God, I just do not want consumer investors investing in this. I'd love large institutions, I'd love people that want to go and educate themselves. Your average consumer that's buying Tesla because they think Teslas are cool cars or buying Amazon because they use Amazon every day, hey, may be good investments, may be bad investments, but they're sure as hell not using Bitcoin in their daily lives. So it's not something they should be investing in unless you understand what you're investing in. You shouldn't be investing in it unless you have a very balanced portfolio. Look, I think Everybody should put 5 to 10% of their investment portfolio into Bitcoin and ether, maybe a couple other crypto assets. But that's because when you do that, when you put 5% of your investment portfolio into a highly speculative, uncorrelated asset class, you actually mitigate the overall risk of your investment portfolio simply because it is uncorrelated. And thus, even grandma should put a tiny bit of her investment portfolio into Bitcoin, but she shouldn't be mortgaging her house to do it. And it shouldn't be a huge amount of money. It should only be a very small yet respectable amount of her portfolio, just due to the historical performance of this asset class.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, but the media narrative has definitely driven people to put way too much of their money into crypto.

Yeah, I mean, just I ask because people do argue that it sort of helps with awareness or it's something important for, again, mass adoption. But that's why we have to clarify what mass adoption means.

Yeah. What is mass adoption? Like, mass adoption of Bitcoin as a payment system. Yeah, right. Not gonna happen. So, like, not anytime soon.

Well, not in the way, like.

Well, I'm saying, like, look, when we go to a cashless society, people really have a use case. But, like, look, using cash is almost always gonna be better than using Bitcoin today. And so mass adoption is not gonna happen until we create tools that actually catalyze that adoption. But that's certainly not where we are right now.

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Sam.