105. What Is Bitcoin? Bitcoin Prediction 2022

You are listening to the Wealth Without Bay street podcast, a Canadian guide to building dependable wealth. Join your hosts, Richard Canfield and Jason Lowe as they unlock the secrets to creating financial peace of mind in an uncertain world. Discover the strategies and mindsets to a financial future that you can bank on.

What will the price of bitcoin be in 2032?

Is that a question for me?

Yeah. Well, we had a bit of a discussion before the I hit the record button, but that that headline alone in the video is going to get us 67 million views. And we're just so pleased to be joined today by Mike Grantis. He's the managing director of the crypto venture capital firm Contango Digital Assets, as well as a partner at the Web3 incubator block scale studio. And Mike also owns Crypto Weekly, which is a multi channel crypto media platform. And the focus, which is why we're here today, is on educating investors and reporting top news in the industry. And in 2020, Mike also launched Bitcoin 101, an educational course taken by over 13,000 students spanning 57 countries.

Wow.

And Mike has been a guest speaker at multiple crypto Summits discussing Bitcoin, NFTs, DeFi and the Metaverse. Some of these topics we were having a fireside conversation about before the show. And we're also joined by Peter Lount, who is an amazing teammate, colleague and authorized practitioner of the infinite banking concept. The process of becoming your own banker, an active investor himself as well, not only in businesses, but in things like crypto. And of course, Richard Canfield, co host, dear friend, colleague, gentlemen, it's great to be with all of you. And Mike, welcome to Wealth Without Bay Street.

Thank you so much, Jason. It's such a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you offering the platform.

Yeah, we're happy to have you. And with Peter hosting a cash flow Canucks and you guys having weekly conversations and touching base on this subject of cryptocurrency. And it's such a hot topic out there and there's so much wild speculation going on, there's so much misinformation and I think for the general public at large, there's still somewhat of a misunderstanding or just an absence of knowledge of what is this cryptocurrency, you know, what is that? How does it impact me in my day to day life and where is it going in the future? And we'd love to open things up in the show just by having you talk a little bit to our viewers and listeners, maybe share some things that folks need to know about cryptocurrency in general?

Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. I would say to anybody just starting in the industry or just wanting to learn a little bit more about cryptocurrency and what this whole industry is, I always recommend starting with bitcoin because bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to get to global. It was what really introduced the world to blockchain. And it's really what a lot of these new coins are children essentially of bitcoin. So a lot of them are built on the same type of framework that that bitcoin is built on, which is the blockchain. And so the first thing that you need to understand about Bitcoin is that it's a decentralized and permissionless money. So it's essentially a monetary layer on the Internet that allows anybody around the world to transfer value without an intermediary. So this is a revolution in technology. This is a major step for civilization in the same way that the Internet was a major step for civilization. And what I always say when I, when I talk about Bitcoin is that the Internet was built as this data transfer layer. And so the Internet is really good at sharing information around the world. You can send a picture to anybody around the world, and it can get that to them at the speed of light. Now the problem is when you share information, you have this, this issue where if I send you a picture, I might still have that picture. And so it's great for sharing information, but it's not so great at sharing value. Because what's to say that I send you money and I'm still not holding onto that same money? It's called the double spending problem. And so bitcoin was the first money or the first monetary system on the Internet that solved that double spending problem. So we can now securely transfer value online as opposed to just sharing data online. So at its base layer, what you can look at blockchain as, as a value transfer protocol, as opposed, as opposed to the Internet, which is a data transfer protocol. So this is fundamental, right? This is a tectonic shift in the way that we organize, in the way that we share value as a society, because we have this new monetary system that's totally decentralized, not printed by a government. Nobody owns it. And funny enough, nobody knows who created it. And so that's part of the mystery. And the religion of Bitcoin is that it has almost this immaculate conception where nobody actually knows who the founder is. And so it allows this technology to far outlive whoever was, whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was, that the. The pseudonym who founded it. And so it's always a good first principles approach to look at Bitcoin as your first kind of entry point into the crypto space. And then you can start to learn About Ethereum and NFTs and the metaverse and all the cool things that have been built after that. But bitcoin specifically is sound money. It's the soundest money we've ever known. It's the only monetary asset that has a fixed supply and a supply that's totally uncorrelated to demand. So for any other monetary asset on earth, be it real estate, be it gold, be it any type of commodity, the amount of demand for that asset affects the supply of that asset. If a lot of people want it, more gold is going to be mined. If a lot of people want houses, more houses are going to be built. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, period, point blank. No matter how many people want to buy Bitcoin or buy real estate on the bitcoin network, there will only ever be 21 million. And so if you buy one Bitcoin today, you will always have one 21 millionth of the entire value of that network. So this is extremely important, because as the network continues to grow, the value of that network continues to grow. And it's the first time that we've ever had a money whose value is tied to the network effect. We know why Amazon, we know why Facebook, we know why these large tech companies have such high values. And it's because of the network effect. So as more people use the network, the value of that network grows exponentially. The same thing is true with Bitcoin. As we add more holders of Bitcoin and more nodes to the system, the value of Bitcoin grows exponentially because there's more places you can send Bitcoin, there's more places you can spend Bitcoin. And so there's more utility for this asset. And so we're seeing this. This asset who had an immaculate conception, no venture capital funding behind it, no board of directors, no CEO. This emergent asset on the Internet that is now growing faster than any technology in human history. It is growing at double the speed that the Internet grew at its same pace. So at its peak, the Internet grew at 68% per year. Bitcoin is growing at 113% per year, so almost double the pace of the Internet. Wow. Amazing technology.

Absolutely. And quick prediction. And we're not going to hold anybody to this and you know, full disclaimer. We're not handing out any investment advice. We're not registered investment advisors. We have no intention here of giving you any investment counsel at all. Make sure that you talk to a registered investment advisor to help you make decisions about where to invest your money. But this is just, just in good, in good fun. Four of us together. Prediction. Okay, Mike, here we go. I'm going to give my prediction. Peter. Invite you, Rich. Invite you, Mike as well.

Mike, what will the price of Bitcoin be? February 11, 2032.

So one decade from now.

Yep.

And this is not financial advice, but I would say bitcoin is over a million dollars.

Okay.

And I can do some deductive reasoning after you guys give your prediction, but I'll, I'll tell you why I come to that number.

Okay, Peter, you're next.

Okay. I was going to jump in, Mike. My quickstart energy, my quick start energy just overtook it. Peter, I'm Rich.

You go, you go.

I was going to say, before Mike even chimed in, I was going to say 1.2, you know, 1.2 million, basically, relative to right now we're measuring this against the US Dollar, which is how it's basically measured presently.

Okay, Peter, I am hopeful this is there. I have no sound logic behind this necessarily, but I hope it's multiples of what Rich and Mike have both said.

Okay, I'm going to say $1,456,024.

On February 11, 2032. And let's see, now we have to obviously talk about what happens when, you know, what is the prize for the person who's closest to that number and.

What, what tropical destination are we going to be sitting when, when we have this discussion 10 years from now?

Okay, well, here's, I'll, I'll just throw it out there. You guys feel free to do it.

Too, if you'd like.

But so full disclosure, I own bitcoin. I plan to own more bitcoin. And so if, if I'm closest to the number and I, and I win the prediction, then the four of us can go, we can spend a few days wherever you'd like. Pick a tropical destination, as Richard said, all expenses paid by.

Bitcoin.

Bitcoin.

And we'll go and have a great time. So I'll, I'll just throw that out there. I'm not expecting you guys to throw anything else out there unless, like you want to car, you know, some bitcoin or.

I would, I, I'd do The same offer, but I won't actually spend my bitcoin. I'll put a lien against it, maybe.

Okay, I like that. I love it.

And I agree. Well, I'll. I'll jump in there too, and I'll say, let's do the same thing. Okay, now the one. The. The. The million dollar question is, is it price is right rules or is it closest to the number? Because I think I was the lowest. Lowest bet. Depends how we're doing these. This. Closest to.

Yeah, well, we'll say it's. It's closest to. So on that day. And I'll set a Google calendar reminder right now on that day, we'll check what it. What bitcoin is trading for on that day. We can do a spot price with whatever you guys want, but we'll see who's actually closest to the moment. We check it. That's the price. So we started the podcast at whatever time we did today. We'll check it at the same time, and whatever the price is, poof. Whoever's closest to that number wins.

And Lana's going to put it in your calendar, not you.

That's correct.

And then also in every situation, we all win because bitcoin went up, and.

The vacation will happen either at the tropical destination or at that same tropical destination in the metaverse, whatever you guys choose. If we just. If we want to avoid the plane and we want to avoid the travel and all that stuff, we can just hop into the metaverse and have a great, great holiday there.

I should document an actual number then, now that we're doing this. So I'm going to say $10 million.

You're going to say 10 million.

You got a gap. You got a gap to work with there, Jay, because 10. We'll all be happy.

My God. Okay. Well, yeah.

Wow.

Okay, I guess I'm going to say. I got to say an actual number then, too. So I'm going to say $1,055,450.

Love it.

Okay. Beauty, rich.

Now I gave 1.2. I'm going to keep it at a knee. You're going to keep there. Yeah. I'm a simplifier, so I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty specifics, but what I'm curious about is, Mike, you also identified. Okay. You have. You have your own rationale, your own reasons through your research and your knowledge base around how you would justify that number. So can you speak to that a little bit for. Just for context for our listeners as to what what prompted you to go to that level?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, going back to the, the initial point about bitcoin, that it's a fixed supply. There's 21 million bitcoin right around the world today. And correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think I'm in the range. I think we have about 350 trillion to $400 trillion of wealth around the world. That's M1 money supply, M2 money supply, that's real estate, that's gold stocks, you know, you name it. That's the, that's the amount of wealth around the world. Now what's the total addressable market for bitcoin really? It could suck up wealth from every asset class around the world. But let's just use gold as an example because the initial, the initial argument for bitcoin is that it's Gold 2.0. And what makes it Gold 2.0? Well, it's a store of value. It's got a finite supply. Gold also has a finite supply there over above ground and below ground. There's only a finite amount of gold on earth. So it's got a finite supply. It's divisible, it's transferable, it's portable, it's durable. And so it has all these characteristics of money. And bitcoin has those same characteristics, except multiples, better on all accounts because, because it's digital and so you can transfer bitcoin easier. It's easier to divide, it's easier to store, it's easier. It's in some cases, you might say more durable because as long as one computer runs the bitcoin network, the entire network lives. And we have satellites in space now running the bitcoin network. So I think, you know, we're, we're safe on that aspect. And it's more finite. We know exactly how much bitcoin there are where we don't know how much gold.

There's also a purity thing because gold can be melted with other dissimilar, amendable. So you have to actually validate, you know, what's the purity level of the goal. Whereas here it's all validated by the blockchain itself.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so hits on all of these characteristics of money that gold was supposed to be. Now gold is no longer. There's money is no longer on the gold standard. So fiat dollars are essentially printed paper monopoly money. Right. It's not tied to anything anymore. For a long time the dollar was tied to gold, but it's not anymore. So gold doesn't actually have, doesn't actually affect the, the currency supply anymore in the same way that it did. But let's use gold, the gold market as an example. Now gold is 10 trillion, $11 trillion market at the moment. Bitcoin right now is, is just under 1 trillion. And so just to get to that market cap of gold, we would need to more than 10x. So from the current price, that's call it 50k. For, for simplicity, that's a 500k Bitcoin. Now because bitcoin executes on all of those things that gold executes on. But better we might look at bitcoin as an asset class and also say that it has this monetary premium because it could be the backbone of sovereign states. So sovereign states could peg their currency to the dollar. Whereas it's very difficult now to peg your dollar to gold because one, there's just, there's not enough of it. And two, you know, we, that ship has sailed long ago. And so we've already, we've already made that, that, that cardinal sin. So we can still have this, this peg to bitcoin and we have this infinite divisibility of bitcoin. And so you can now start to transact in satoshis as opposed to having, you know, ounces of gold and you know, going in to pay for a cup of coffee with a fleck of gold the size of your fingernail. So it has this monetary premium that gold today isn't executing on or doesn't, doesn't execute on. And so it would make sense to say that at bare minimum, we should be able to double the gold market in the price of bitcoin. Now to double the price, to double the gold market in the price of bitcoin, that would get US to roughly $1 million. Now the growth of this technology is happening so quickly and the growth of any new, you know, revolutionary technology, be it mobile phones, be it the Internet, all kind of follow this S curve, right? And generally speaking, it takes the same amount of time to get to 10% global adoption as it does to get from 10% to 90% global adoption. So if we look at the history of bitcoin being starting in 2008, so about 15 years, if we look another, and we're only at roughly 5% global adoption, or potentially even lower than that, if we look at that extrapolating out another 10 years, we might be at 30, 40, 50% global adoption 10 years from now or potentially even higher. Right, right. And so it would make sense to say if bitcoin's value follows the network effect, we should easily be able to get to that. That 10x or. Or even 20x of its value currently, because it would follow the same. The same network effect that it's. That its prices has had in. In the history of its. Or in the history of its existence. And on average, people are even being.

Connected to the Internet as well even as we speak. So we're seeing a huge adoption rate of people just getting able to access and be connected online that don't have regular banking capacity that we've been accustomed to here. So. So the use case actually amplifies the. For that marketplace of people in the world that haven't had access to the traditional banking mechanisms that we're used to here for the last, you know, a hundred some years.

Absolutely. And if you also look at, you know, the. The adoption of the Internet and what I would now call the adoption of the metaverse, many people might not look at things like Twitter or TikTok or Facebook as Metaverse or even zoom calls like we're on right now, but really, this is the kind of fledgling first step in getting into the metaverse. And as more and more people spend more and more of their lives online, doesn't it make sense to start transacting in a currency that's native to the Internet?

Absolutely.

So Bitcoin is really the first native currency for the Internet. Wow.

It's fascinating. Fascinating subject. Thank you, Mike. That's just amazing. And tell us a little bit more about the course, the educational course that sounds particularly interesting.

Yeah. So, you know What? Originally, Bitcoin101, I created Bitcoin101 as an educational tool for friends and family. I had so much of my. So many friends and family from kind of 2016-17, you know, all the way up to now, asking me about Bitcoin. And it wasn't scalable for myself to teach everybody about all these different amazing attributes of bitcoin individually. And so I thought, you know what? I'm gonna make a course, and then whenever anybody asks me about it, I'm gonna send them a free link to the course and they can go take it and, you know, be done with it. Right. And if you have questions after the course, feel free to talk to me, but until you finish that course, you know, hands off. And so that was initially the impetus, and I was blown away. I was dumbfounded by the amount of engagement and the amount of positive review that came from this. And so, you know, I launched the course on Udemy at the end of 2020 or actually the beginning of 2020 and now just two years later, 13,000 people, as you said, you know, 57 different countries, eight translated in 18 different languages.

So honored and humbled to at least have my stamp or my impact on people's education or at least getting into the crypto space.

Love it.

My. My entire goal in getting into this space and in educating people was always just to, To. To grow adoption of crypto. Because I truly look at it as social revolution. I look at it as the next generation or the next evolution of the human civilization. And so the quicker we can get to this point of becoming your own bank and of the sovereign individual having control of their money, control of their identity, control of.

The better we all are as a society. Well, and the better I am because, you know, I was an early adopter, but you know, at the, at the end of the day, it all came down to this, this, this need for the public to get more educated on the subject and from people who, you know, are not ne. Do not necessarily have a hidden agenda at the point, at that point when I started the course, I didn't own Crypto Weekly, I didn't own Contango. And so it was mainly just a way to get the word out about crypto. No kind of hidden agendas involved. And I think that's what peop. What. What really drew people into the course was that it wasn't selling anything aside from maybe bitcoin, but it was more just educating people on bitcoin and really just trying to take a stance of objectivity. He laying out the facts, laying out kind of where we've come from in history and why it's all culminated to. To right now for this need for this, this, this safe haven asset. And so it was kind of just an educational journey that I took myself on, but also just a way of expressing that love for, for this industry to, to the masses.

Wow, that's awesome. How'd you and Peter get acquainted?

We were talking about this actually today and I think it was Matthew Hunt, which is a connection of both of ours on.

Oh yeah, I know Matt real well.

And does too, right?

He's a great guy. Awesome guy.

Great guy.

Shout out to Matt. Automation Wolf. Amazing guy.

Shout out. Shout out Matt. Yeah, he, he actually really helped me in my kind of early stages in my career. We worked together a little bit with the automation wolf thing. But he's just a great educator. He's, you know, really passionate about what he does and really takes the time to teach People not just what to do, but why it's important and why they're, why they should be kind of acting in these ways. And so, yeah, I, I owe a lot to Matt, but. Shout out to Matt if you're listening.

And I was going to say too, when we met, you were not full time in crypto, right? You had, you didn't have Crypto weekly, all that, but you just, I think you were, you had the beta course I think was coming out when we met. And I said, okay, let's take me through it. And I'm always interested in learning something new. And, you know, you just had such a passion for it. And, you know, I enjoyed the course and we continued the conversation and then led to Crypto weekly and having you on weekly and kind of selfishly, I'm learning, but sharing with other people. Right. Your message. So it's, it's been a good journey.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I feel like we kind of started that journey together. Peter. You know, one thing I would say is I spent a lot of time researching crypto, kind of doing my own due diligence, doing my own homework before I even purchased my first bitcoin. And partially because I just didn't even know where I could buy bitcoin at the time, there was, you know, it was a lot less easy and user friendly to buy bitcoin back in 2016. But essentially that journey helped me build my, you know, my passion for the space, but also just my conviction in the technology. And so it was that six month journey prior to me actually even purchasing Bitcoin that really helped me get my grounding and get my kind of head on straight to say this is a tectonic shift in the way the world operates. This is probably the big, you know, technological advancement in the history of the human civilization. And it's not very often you can say that with confidence, but I think there's, there's probably a lot of listeners out there that would agree with me.

And there's probably gonna be, you would think at some point there'll be maybe, what, a few cryptocurrencies that, you know, really make the grade to be here for the long term. And, you know, much like, much like what's happened in the evolution of currency, you know, in general, but the larger, you know, brains out on Wall street and on Bay street who are, you know, really having these discussions around it to say, hey, you know, the, the money's gotta flow somewhere. So is it, you know, is bitcoin gonna be and, and stay at the forefront is another crypto going to, you know, take over and, and be at the forefront. I mean, these are all unknowns, I, I would suppose right at this, at this stage. But I think, you know, my, my, with the, with my limited knowledge on the subject, it would seem to me that Bitcoin is here to stay.

100%. I would say Bitcoin is here to stay. Now, are there going to be other cryptocurrencies that are going to be successful? Yes.

But one thing that's really important to delineate about the kind of crypto ecosystem, one of the first questions always for new people to the industry is why are there thousands of cryptocurrencies? Isn't Bitcoin the best? Or why would I buy anything else if Bitcoin is, you know, the one that's going to go to the moon? And what I would say is this whole industry tokens unto themselves are a new digital primitive. So they don't all try and execute on what Bitcoin executes on. Bitcoin is in a realm of its own because Bitcoin executes on a store of value and sound money. Those are really the two things that Bitcoin does that nothing else in the industry really compares to it in that. So if you're looking at cryptocurrency and the investment thesis is I want a store of value and I want something that's, I want a monetary system that can't be changed really, that, that's untamperable to some extent. Bitcoin is in a realm of its own. There will, there will, in my opinion, never be a true competitor to Bitcoin. Because what Bitcoin did is it introduced this, this, this theory of sound money and secure online peer to peer payments to the world. And it did it in such a immaculate way that it kind of introduced this, this whole new wave of thinking to say, hey, we can actually have this native currency on the Internet, it's Bitcoin. So Bitcoin, a very different value proposition or a very different investment thesis to something like Ethereum. Now everybody talks about do I buy Bitcoin or do I buy Ethereum? Well, you would buy them for different reasons. The reason you'd buy Bitcoin is, as I said, for sound money and for this kind of store of value thesis, you would buy Ethereum because it is in many cases the building blocks of Web3. So it's like buying the underlying infrastructure of the new Internet. So if you look at the way the previous Web two or the Previous Web one Internet was built, you know, HTTP built on this, you know, base layer framework. We could never buy HTTP, right? We could never buy, you know, simple mail transfer protocol. You know, we couldn't buy that protocol as an asset. But now with Web3, you have the ability to buy this underlying currency that runs the operations of, of most of what we now call web3. And so Ethereum now is your, your, the, the investment thesis would be to buy Ethereum as a network play or as, as kind of a play on the next generation of the Internet. Whereas that's a very different value proposition to Bitcoin. So it makes sense maybe to have both of those in your portfolio, but you would buy them for different reasons. And we can talk a lot, we, we can talk more about Ethereum and smart contracts and you know, why that is so revolutionary on, on to its own right. But Bitcoin really was the first and it's really the only one today that's executing on that store of value and sound money thesis.

So interesting.

It's a great, you know, way that you separated them because the, the, the use case is critical and people, I think because of how much the media is taking a grasp on what's going on because, you know, Bitcoin being hot and crypto in general, and now people are starting to learn about NFTs and what is that and what does that even mean? What do they look like? And so you're getting snippets of information along the way, but a lot of people don't really recognize, okay, well how might I use this? So you've given us some use cases already at Bitcoin and now you've indicated you mentioned smart contracts. And so talking about, you know, I'd equate what you identified Mike as, you know, imagine you could own the nuclear power system or the hydroelectric plant that runs the power for the entire Eastern seaboard where you live or whatever that is. That would be kind of, you know, the relationship equivalent to what you identified with the Ethereum token, where now you're getting a part of that infrastructure in this Web3 model. And then you can now exchange and utilize that medium of exchange because it's still a medium that's exchangeable, validated by the blockchain that it's on to. Now go and do something with it of, of tangible use or, you know, so, so let's maybe talk about some of those use cases to give people a picture of. Like what, what would one example of that look like?

There, there are so like the Human mind can't even comprehend what the use cases of Ethereum might be.

Right.

In the same way that you know, when we invented the Internet it was really just invented to warn sovereign countries overseas about potential war. Right? It was, it was built as a military information sharing protocol. And then all the things that kind of exploded from human consciousness after that, we really had no idea. I think we're at the same point place with Ethereum. The one really amazing thing that Ethereum brought to the world was this, this concept of smart contracts. Now smart contracts weren't actually invented by Ethereum. Actually the, the idea was, was posed by Nick Szabo, you know, who was one of the people quoted in the, in the Bitcoin white paper or one of the initial, the early kind of cyberpunks. But he kind of created this idea of smart contracts and then what Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum did was he kind of operationalized it in, in this Ethereum network. But smart contracts are pretty amazing. What they do is they kind of, they are like.

Feet for money. Let me explain that, that analogy like it's, it runs off if then, if then statements. So what you can have is this contract that could tell, tell money to go, if this happens, go over into this bank account and you know, and go, go there. If this happens, this money should go here or this money should be distributed to this, these people. And so you can take out this entire level of human interaction by just automating these smart contracts with value. We, we have, we have to some extent smart contracts with data that say okay, on Excel, if this happens, then this happens. We can make those type of statements with data, but it's very difficult to make those statements with money. And Ethereum is really the first thing that kind of cracked that code to say okay, you can now write a contract that says if, you know, you can, you can write an insurance contract that says if it and a farmer can buy this insurance contract to say if it doesn't rain at least 25% of the year in my location then I should get an insurance payout. Right? So you don't have to fight with an insurance company for claims. You don't have to claw back the money that you've paid to that insurance company. It's simply based on math. It's based on if this happened then this should happen. And what that does is.

Creates a new paradigm for the way that we think about peer to peer interaction or interaction with corporations. For example, there's this, there's this kind of theory that I've heard the founder of Chainlink, which is another cryptocurrency or Oracle protocol. He, he's, he has this line of thinking to say right now we think in, in brand based contracts, right? So we trust a brand because of the history of the brand, because of, you know, the value that that BR brand has brought to the table. And that's why we have trust in that brand. Whereas we're moving now to trust so, so math based contracts as opposed to brand based contracts. And the difference is, is staggering, especially when we start to look at, you know, insolvency events or, you know, potential downfalls in financial systems. It pays to have insurances based on math as opposed to, based on the goodwill of a brand or, you know, the competitive nature of a market. It pays to have these securities based on code on, you know, sound mathematics. Right. And so this is a, this is kind of a net new way to, to look at contracts.

Super cool, Peter.

Yeah, I was going to add to, you know, Jason, you talked about Wall Street, Bay street, right. In terms of how this will all shake out, I think maybe Mike can talk about that in terms of that and the S current. You know, I simulate that to the PC home computing industry. Once you get to a certain point in that S curve, 40, 50%, there's gonna be a shakeout, right. And only the strongest will survive. We no longer see gateway computer, Commodore 64, all those things. Right. And maybe that talks to Jason's point of where are we going with all this? There's literally thousands of tokens out there. Who's going to be. Bitcoin's gonna be one, but there's still gonna be a whole swath of them that are, we're gonna see over our lifetime. But who's gonna. There's gonna be there standing.

I do own a Commodore 64 shirt. Does that count?

Well, you know, Peter, what I would, what I would say is there's definitely going to be a shakeout. There's definitely gonna be a rise and fall and a bubble in this space. Right. Anytime there's a lot of opportunity to make money really quickly, you're gonna see a bubble. And I think that's what we're seeing, you know, in crypto. Maybe we're not to the peak of that bubble by any means, but I think that will happen at some point in the future. But I want to go back to the point that I made about tokens being a digital primitive. You know, the Web2 Digital Primitive was the website, right. So when, when Companies started to go online, they started to think of websites as well, how do I take what I have physically and how do I replicate that online? You know, so how do I maybe put a menu online or how do I put kind of like hours of operation online? And so we had these kind of static websites and it, the word that Chris, Chris Dixon uses is skeuomorphic. So you weren't thinking about these websites as brand new ways to share and transfer information, brand new digital primitives to do different things like social media. It was skeuomorphic. So we looked at what we had in the physical world and we said, how do we replicate that into the digital world? And I think what we have right now is this brand new digital primitive of tokens. You know, tokens I would equate to the same type of primitive that the website was. And so now we're in this kind of transition phase to figure out what even is a token, what, you know, what are all the possibilities that could come from the tokenization of everything. And so part of that proliferation was, okay, now we have fungible tokens and now we have non fungible tokens, NFTs. And then what are the next, what are the next iterations on those things? How do we, how do we start to create more real world utility with NFTs or tokens? How do we create social tokens, you know, tokenized social followings. And so these are all questions that are brand new digital primitives to us. And we're really just along for the ride figuring out what the human consciousness is going to create with this brand new digital primitive. So to go back to Peter's point, you know, there's thousands of these different tokens and aren't some of them going to get shook? Shook out? Sure. I mean companies rose and fall and fell in the dot com bubble, but now we have thousands of upon thousands or maybe even millions of websites on the Internet. And so they all serve kind of a different function. And I think the same thing will happen with this new digital primitive of tokens. We're going to have tokens that have, you know, multitudes of different use cases and they're not all going to be in competition with each other.

Well, you know, I see a lot of things too on online with, especially in, you know, my Facebook newsfeed with folks, you know, including clients who have gotten very actively involved in NFTs and you know, the creation of all I can reference it as is like these cartoon type characters and you know, hey, I made $623 billion in the last five hours after some guy drew a cartoon and I put it up on the NFT platform or, you know, whatever that is. It's just I, I find that so interesting. But yet at the same time, there's a lot to learn because it's completely foreign to me. Like, what, what on earth. Like, what are you talking about? You created this thing and it's trading and you've sold it and you've got like, what on earth is that?

Yeah, you know, it's a great question, and I have to be fully transparent here.

I largely missed the boat on NFTs, and I had the same thought process as you. Right? We have these kind of digital cartoon pictures, and these are now selling for millions of dollars in some cases. But there's a few things that I really want to hit home about NFTs that are, that make them so valuable. The first is reputation and clout. So in the traditional analog world, we would buy a Rolex, we would buy a Lamborghini, we would buy fancy clothes to show our wealth or show our status. Right now, in the digital world with people that are digital natives, they're now looking at these NFTs as new ways to show clout based on how expensive they are. And I would bet that the amount of impressions per Rolex versus the amount of impressions per NFT a lot higher on the NFT side. So you would say, okay, in a digital world where anybody around the world can see me and interact with me, is it better to have Gucci shirt in the real world, or is it better to have a Gucci shirt in the metaverse? Right. How many impressions am I going to get on that? If that's what your core value is, is clout, right? Another, another thing would be identity. So I'll give you three, three reasons why I think NFTs are here to stay. The second is identity. So we as a human collective, want to identify ourselves as part of a tribe, right? As part of, part of a community. And we share those, those values with people in our community. And that's how we find friends, right? That's how we find a community in the real world. The same is true in the digital world, right? We can find identity and we can find sense of self in the communities that we call ourselves a part of. So if you have an NFT that millions of people want, but there's only 10,000 of those NFTs, and you get to be part of that club, how cool is that for you and your sense of self in, In Kind of the digital, the digital realm. So, you know, this is the, the same type of, type of point. But my third point would be this community, right? As I said, in everything community is value. Network is net worth, right? But that, that thought is so much more true in the cryptocurrency space because truly the, the, the value of these coins is directly correlated to the size of that network and the utility of that network. So you now have people joining these communities to one, you know, show clout to, to show sense of community or belonging, but then also three for real world perks, for access to certain groups or certain communities. Board Ape Yacht Club is a, is a great example how many, you know, celebrities, professional athletes, singers, you know, ultra wealth, super, you know, rich and famous have bought these bored ape Yacht Club NFTs. But one really cool thing is they actually throw parties in the real world for NFT holders. So if you're a holder of this NFT now, you're part of this exclusive community where you can go meet and mingle some of the most rich and successful people on Earth. The same is true for the metaverse, right? I'll give you the example of Snoop Dogg who just bought like a multimillion dollar mansion in sandbox. Well, you know, at face value, you're like, okay, well he's got a ton of money. Why would he, you know, sure, you can spend millions of dollars on that, it doesn't really matter. It's, you know, probably a fun plaything. But if you look at the value of that in, in the real world, he can now issue an NFT to some of the richest, brightest, smartest people on Earth and say, hey, I'm having a party at my house in the Metaverse. Only people with this NFT are going to be able to join. And he can then congregate all the richest, most famous people on Earth into this one party in the Metaverse. No bouncers, no security needed. Only people with that NFT can get in because it's secured by cryptocurrency and math. So there are a lot of use cases to this technology. The first use case we've seen with NFTs has just been profile pictures and sense of community. But NFTs will proliferate almost every market. You'll have, you know, you'll have contracts on, on NFTs. You'll have, you know, students writing papers that will then be NFTs to show that was their work, right? You'll have leases and property rights on, on NFTs to show I'm the owner of this property and nobody else.

And self published authors and things of that artist. Sounds like Artists is a really big community that's taking an initial, you know, jump right in for these NFTs right now.

Yeah. I'll give you a really cool example of a company that I met with last week called Alexandria. And what they're doing is they're, they're publishing books via nft. But then you'll also have the ability to, to mark up those books or to, to annotate those books in the way that you'd like. And so your specific book, let's say Elon Musk read a book about Elon Musk, read his biography and he annotated that biography. Well, how cool would it be to be able to purchase the Elon Musk biography annotated by Elon Musk. Right. And so they're kind of creating this new paradigm of digital ownership. It's not just the published book that people love, but it's also the ideas of the person who's reading it. What about an annotated book by Bill Gates or an annotated book by some of the most rich and famous people on Earth? Right. The ideas are so wide ranging and as I said. Right. The human mind is the only thing that's really limiting us at this point to what we mind is full.

Well, we don't want you to wreck your mic because it looks like it's on a stand. So we don't want you to drop it here specifically, even though that was a mic drop moment, I would say. But this has been fantastic, Mike. I mean, you shared so much with us here and I think people who are listeners to the podcast are really going to recognize and understand now some of the potential of this marketplace that maybe they didn't see before. Again, we talk a lot about what's the scene versus the unseen. What's that thing that's on the fringe of the, you know, the little foggy edge that's past the edge of your vision and you've just now extended the vision for people a lot more into that thing that was foggy. Based on our conversation today, which we really appreciate, that's exactly what I was hoping for, to be able to share and provide for our listener base. And so I'm so grateful for that. Now I think we should do a quick roundtable on some final thoughts. And I have a question, Mike, for you before we go. And Jason, I'd love to hear, though, some of the key takeaways that you've taken out of the conversation with Mike today.

Well, I'm definitely going to need to pick up some land in the metaverse as we were chatting about earlier, but reaching out to a realtor is not.

The right way to cope about it.

So we gotta, gotta get, get Mike's help on that. Definitely, you know, the NFT space, so many possibilities there, including you know, some things that we're doing with the wealth of Bay street book series that we're gonna be putting out. And you know, I think the life insurance industry in general is, you know, really has an opportunity to, to be at the forefront of this, especially considering the, the, just the, the fundamental foundation of, you know, a dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contract which is unilaterally binding. It already possesses, you know, all of these great, you know, elements, but just getting it into, you know, a smart contract format, you know, and NFTs and digitizing this is that, that's the future. That's where things are, are going to go. And so it just mind working on, you know, a lot of these ideas that. Thank you, Mike. You've, you've, you've inspired me in, in my thinking about this. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Peter, what's, what's some final thoughts for you? I know that you get to speak to Mike on a regular basis, but I'm sure you got some new, new thoughts passing through that head bone of yours as we went through this conversation.

Always something new for sure. And you know, we, we speak for about 15, 20 minutes every week, so you don't get to expand on ideas like this. And it's really cool. Like, I love sitting in, kind of like listening to all the ideas that Mike has learned. And I think, you know, my journey is, is to learn and to share and I think, you know, put people in, you know, bring people forward who, you know, I think are really good speakers on those topics, whether that be Jason or Richard or even Mike in this case. So I'm, I'm actually looking forward to see how it's implemented within, you know, the wealth of Bay Street Community center finance. I think this maybe got some ideas churning and I look forward to being part of that journey too.

Awesome. That's great. Well, you know, Mike, I don't know if you have a cape in a closet somewhere in your house.

It's in the metaverse.

In the metaverse. I'm sure, yeah, you have one. But we all don't necessarily think of ourselves as superheroes, even though we might watch some Marvel movies here and There. But, you know, I think with what you've shared with us today and how you're, you know, again, you look at your course that you created really to help some people out. Over 13,000 people have been helped out by that course. Now that's how you're showing up as a superhero. And what you're doing here, sharing this knowledge, the things that you've taken in, and now you're, you're regurgitating that in a digestible format for so many other people are our wonderful listeners. That's a way that you get to show up in a powerful way and create a lasting legacy. But our real question for you is, Mike, who do you most want to be a hero to?

What a question. You know what? I want to be a hero to the average everyday person, to the person who's looking for stability in their financial, you know, perspective for a source of truth, for, you know, unbiased opinions on, you know, where. What money is, first of all, and, you know, how to, how to make and store your wealth over time. I think the, the way the world works today is not set up for the average person. It's set up for the 1%. And I think one major thing that crypto does is it democratizes that power. It puts every sovereign individual back in the power, in the driver's seat. And I want to be the, the catalyst to help people get back in that driver's seat. I think there is so much to learn for myself, but there's also so much that I have rattling up in this head of mine that, that, that could be valuable to somebody. And so I think really, the, the. The person I want to be a hero to. Is anybody listening? You know, anybody that, that, that is just looking for way out, a way to opt out of the traditional world, to opt out of the banks, to opt out of fiat currency, to opt out of control and censorship and authoritarianism, and to move back into the driver's seat and to take back control of their life and their wealth.

I love that. Thank you.

Thank you, gentlemen. What an amazing. Mike, we're going to have you back at minimum once a year, so we can. We actually, we should schedule it February 11th each year. Let's check the price, see what's going on. But eventually, you know, we'll be podcasting, but having audience in the, in the metaverse and interacting with folks and, you know, podcasting from digital space, and it's going to be amazing what we're going to be doing with wealth without Bay street and Senate Financial and thank you. Thank you for being here. And for folks who are on the YouTubes, if you just take a look at the playlist that just showed up, isn't that interesting how it just shows up like that? Our editing group is phenomenal. And that is the. The next step in your journey of learning. Keep learning, Keep learning. There's always something new to learn. And as you develop, as we all do, we're continually developing our ability to rethink our thinking. You know, the world is changing and there's so much positivity, so much, so many great things being developed in this space that Mike will have you back and we'll stay in touch on how things are going, but we'll connect offline, too, and talk about a few other things. So thanks guys. What an amazing show. Make the rest of week great. Appreciate you guys very much.

Thank you so much. My pleasure.

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