Lessons - The Man Helping Countries Adopt Bitcoin as Legal Tender | Samson Mow - JAN3 CEO & Fmr Bloc

In this lessons episode, explore why the debate over Bitcoin goes beyond speculation into the future of money itself. Discover how decentralization defines Bitcoin against other cryptocurrencies. Understand critiques of Ethereum and smart contracts as financial infrastructure. And uncover how incentives and venture capital have shaped the broader crypto ecosystem. You mentioned that one of the outcomes of this particular battle could render Bitcoin, quote-unquote, meaningless. But I would like to understand because I don't know if there is a... Across the board, I'm sure you have a very defined meaning for Bitcoin, but across the board, it doesn't seem like there is a universal understanding of what it should or should not be. So what is Bitcoin's meaning? Is it something that's supposed to be transactional? Is something supposed to be a store of value, more symbolic of gold or something like that? And then I'm also curious about if you are very bullish on Bitcoin, and I only know enough to be dangerous, so if I'm misspeaking, you tell me. I'm not as into it as some people are. But if you are very bullish on Bitcoin, then I also want to understand the place that Ethereum and blockchains that, from my understanding, operate like an OS or an operating system and you build things on them. So that's just sort of where I'm curious about because I want to unpack that. But first, let's describe Bitcoin. what Bitcoin is, how it has meaning versus what is a meaningless version of Bitcoin in your interpretation. So I guess I'll go with the easy answer first. And is that the question is, am I bullish on Bitcoin? I'm very bullish on Bitcoin. I see Bitcoin as the ultimate end state. And that is what you're asking about earlier. What is hyper-Bitcoinization? Hyper-Bitcoinization. Hyper-Bitcoinization is the point at which we don't convert back to fiat money, similar to how you don't convert dollars to seashells anymore. You might buy a seashell for a decorative thing or a necklace, but you're not going to buy seashells and hoard them to store value, right? But the other part is, what is Bitcoin? And the answer is very simple. Bitcoin is simply money. So it is all of those things that you mentioned. It is a store of value. It's a medium of exchange. And eventually it will be a unit of account. And on some levels, it's already a unit of account. But what is a useless version of Bitcoin? I would say that is Ethereum. Ethereum is centralized. It's basically a central bank digital currency at this point because it's just big institutions running the chain. So it's kind of defeated the purpose already. You don't have... Is it similar to Ripple? Excuse me, just to understand, is that similar to Ripple in terms of centralization? It's similar to Ripple. It's similar to FTT. It's similar to everything. So you have Bitcoin on one side of the spectrum, which is decentralized, permissionless, immutable. And then you have everything else on the varying levels of uselessness, right? So, you know... I think there are some cryptocurrencies that you could say are relatively decentralized, but for the most part, 99% of them, they're all masquerading as decentralized. They set up a Swiss foundation somewhere and they say we're decentralized, but it's really Vitalik and his buddies deciding monetary policy. So you effectively have reduced, replaced the federal reserve with a bunch of guys, you know, on a zoom call that know nothing about money, deciding what money is. And that's, Right now, I mean, they're on a kick to make Ethereum sound money. So they're trying to implement monetary policy and make it more valuable, right? Like reducing the supply, burning fees, locking things up so that people can't withdraw from staking pools or whatever. But that can change. If you can change in one direction, you can change in the other direction, right? So when Ethereum price is high, they can say, well, we need some inflation. We're going to print some more. And this is totally within their power to do. And this is why a lot of Bitcoiners call Ethereum a shitcoin because it's so malleable. They can change anything they want. It was hacked. There was a DAO hack. They rolled it back on the chain. And I believe that was the inflection point for them to just fail. They could have been. I think that was the first SEC investigation into anything crypto, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't it? No. Perhaps, but I mean, Ethereum is really an unregistered security. And a lot of these things are unregistered securities, FTT included. But pretty much every crypto is an unregistered security. And this is why Bitcoiners try to distance ourselves from all those things, because they are trying to affinity scam and say, we're like Bitcoin, we're the same thing. And they want Bitcoin to be a subset of crypto, but it's actually very different. Very interesting. And I'm super curious because actually prepping for this interview, I saw you actually did a podcast with Vitalik and I didn't realize. Now I understand whoever the host was. I can't remember his name, but now I understand why he got you both on that call. I didn't listen to the whole thing, and now I probably will after this. I should have. I didn't realize it was such a contentious podcast. But if you were going to say this to Vitalik, what's Vitalik's argument? Because that's a pretty bold claim. I've never heard this claim before that Ethereum is a shitcoin. I've heard a lot of shitcoins are shitcoins, but not Ethereum. Well, the thing is, every shitcoin likes to call other things shitcoins, and they think they're not, but they are. So I remember I don't... Do Kwon was laughing at other things and saying, oh, they're all shit coins and they're going to fail. We know how that ended up. Yeah, you know how that ended up, right? But Ethereum is just malleable. If you look at some of their early recordings of their meetups and things, they're talking about their ICO. I mean, that in itself is an indicator that it's a security, right? It's an effort by a group of people to make money and attract investment into their project. It's just that they don't have a company, right? Yeah. But if you look at everything that Ethereum does, it's basically a company. A DAO is basically a board of directors, right? You're just saying it's a tokenized thing and therefore it's not under the existing framework. But I think regulators and the CFTC and SEC, they're starting to understand that a lot of that's just bullshit. It's really a securities offering that you're trying to pretend is decentralized. And I think the time is running out for these guys. Now, then that sort of this is a great way to sort of dovetail into the thing that I alluded to earlier, which is smart like smart contracts built on Ethereum. I've never in my life heard of a smart contract, which is, again, if Ethereum is EOS and you're saying it's a centralized OS and the points you're making are very valid. Then you have all these programs built on all these smart contracts and all these other things that we've now, you know, it's blown up into everything from DeFi to NFTs to whatever. I'm not sure if they're all built on Ethereum. I don't think they are, but a lot of shit has been built on Ethereum. So I haven't seen much built on Bitcoin. So why has there not been more of an explosion in smart contracts and the understanding that Bitcoin can be an underlying OS for all these applications? Well, you don't really need an underlying OS. The world doesn't need some sort of OS. And if it did have an OS, it should be decentralized. But there are things built on Bitcoin, but they're not the same scale as Ethereum, simply because the Silicon Valley money machine is not investing in... companies building on top of sound money. Silicon Valley itself does not understand sound money. They don't even understand gold, barely. What they're interested in is a quick turnaround and a quick gain on their investment. Like if you watch the all-in podcast where you have Chamath and David Sachs and those guys, they're all talking about Solana and pumping their bags, right? But super fast liquidity and turnaround on their investment. And they can achieve that through investing in these token projects that have no real purpose or utility. It's just an easy way to dump on retail investors. So they don't need to wait 7 to 10 years for a company to go public. They buy Solana in a pre-sale at discount and sell it to retail investors and then they're good, right? So this is why there's such a big... big push for all of these projects and smart contracts, right? At the end of the day, you're building smart contracts which are not necessarily immutable or a good idea. And so, you know, unchangeable because they build backdoors into them. If you Google smart contract backdoor, you'll see a lot of these smart contracts, they say, you know, code is law and they've written their rule set in here, but then there's like an access point where they can shut it off. And just like a five minute Google will show you, there's so many of these cases and all of them are very unsecure. If you Google DeFi hacks, you'll find pages and pages of hacks. Every week there is a DeFi hack because they're just building JavaScript constructs that are unsecure, and have backdoors and centralize. So this is why none of this is really meaningful. Even a smart contract itself needs some sort of input. It's not like a smart contract will just run on its own. If you go back to the simple example of buying real estate, there has to be some proof that the transaction happens and then the funds are transferred, right? So there's always some input into these things. But the bigger problem is you're building smart contracts and and DeFi stuff that is just relying on trading governance tokens or worthless tokens like fruit, dog tokens, for other dog tokens and other governance tokens. So it's really a house of cards where you're staking some governance token to get another governance token to trade some other governance token. At the end of the day, none of the governance tokens even are meaningful because... decentralized. And it's a small group of people that's going to decide regardless of the governance token's direction. Thanks for tuning in. 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