Thanks for the kind words, man. You got it. Great question. And this is actually one of the more fascinating accomplishments, I think, of Satoshi. I mean, obviously he solved the Byzantine general's problem, the practical use of proof of work. I mean, these are a lot of the common acclaimed compliments that Satoshi has gotten. I think one of the most important innovations of Satoshi is how he was able to fairly distribute Bitcoin to the people, to the individual, to the street. And I'll land this plane. I'll get back to why that's so relevant to your question. So, can Wall Street, and you called it the financial industrial complex, can these guys control Bitcoin? And so, David is also referencing speculation that has merit to it that these guys have been controlling the price of precious metals. Let me tell you a quick story, David, so people know. My grandfather was the youngest ever chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade, of one of the Chicago exchanges here. This story is overblown. I mean, my grandfather died broke, unfortunately. It wasn't like it is today. Like these exchanges and Wall Street is where all the big money was. But back in the day, when he became chairman, I mean, the exchange wasn't even public. So these were like, you know, financial markets and derivatives were new ideas that my grandfather really helped try and get off the ground. Anyway, not to give my trolls and my internet conspiracy theorists too much ammo, but the relevance is the Hunt Brothers. So one of, I'm sure David's aware, but for the audience that isn't, one of the famous cornerings of a precious metals market was the Hunt Brothers, a Texas brother, big Texas money family, and they wanted to corner the silver market. And they actually came to the Chicago exchanges and were, you know, back in the day the way to do this was have your cousin open accounts and your uncles and your aunts, everyone open an account at the Chicago exchanges, and they were going to try and corner the silver market. And my grandfather ran them out of town and said, 'This is Chicago. This is not New York. If you guys are going to try that, you better go to Wall Street. We don't play those games here in Chicago. This is an honest market. This is Midwest America.' So I thought that was cool. But anyway, you know, sometimes people say, 'Oh, do they really control the price of these precious metals markets? Is that conspiracy theory?' I tell you from my grandfather's mouth, it's not a conspiracy theory. The Hunt brothers tried to show up into the Chicago markets and corner the silver market. They ended up putting their positions on in New York. And you guys can go Google how that story ended. But the reason precious metals, let's just even take a step further back. Why was gold able to be demonetized? Screw, you know, price controls and paper derivative markets. Let's just talk about the fact that gold was money and then one day it wasn't, and here we are trying to engineer our way out of this fiat hellhole. And to David's point, bring a little bit of optimism and hope back to this whole humanity thing. Well, gold was demonetized because gold needed a central trusted party, a government, a corporation, a bank in order to achieve transactional finality. Okay, the gold, what's the gold monetary network? It's us humans. If I need to transact gold, I got to walk it across town. I got to fly it across an ocean. Gold could not scale in an economy with a communication channel like the internet or to billions and billions of people. Gold was great if I'm exchanging with my local tailor, my local butcher, my local grocer, and my entire economic experience is within a six-block radius. All of a sudden, if I need to order things on my cell phone, if I need to check out online, if I want to economically have a relationship with someone in another country, another state, I had to deposit gold to someone else and get an IOU in exchange. And so this premise, this idea that Bitcoin, there's capital Bitcoin and lowercase Bitcoin. There's Bitcoin, the asset, the physical bearer instrument, right? And then there's Bitcoin the network. And the most fascinating, underappreciated part about Bitcoin is that it's both. Bitcoin can achieve finality in a transaction without help from any central party I need to trust. And I could do it across a border. I could do it anytime, any day. And that was the problem with gold. And so what happened is all of the gold was deposited with governments and with banks. And one day the government said, 'Oh, the IOUs that you guys are all walking around with, sorry, those aren't good anymore. And what the fuck are you going to do about it?' That's what happened. And so, how do these guys price suppress? Well, the physical market and the paper claims that have been floating around and traded, and the ones that are now called US dollar bills that actually aren't a claim anymore. It's because the physical had to be concentrated in a place where we had to trust. And obviously that's the innovation of Bitcoin is solving that core fundamental problem, is that Bitcoin's not only a bearer asset, it's also a monetary network. The gold monetary network are human beings walking these things around, shipping these things across oceans, depositing them in vaults, and issuing IOUs. Now, tying it back to Satoshi's, I think one of his most underrated and underappreciated geniuses. If you're going to create a new money to solve this problem, one of the most important things in the early days is how are you going to distribute it fairly? Because to your point, David, if Satoshi went to Goldman Sachs and said, 'Hey, I solved the Byzantine general's problem. I finally figured it out where I can get a distributed network to agree on the state of a ledger without anyone being trusted or in control. And I need to take it public. I need to list it on the New York Stock Exchange.' Yeah, Goldman Sachs would have took a 20% position as the sponsoring bank of the IPO and Wall Street would have had first dibs on the 21 million supply. And by the time all of us plebs had a chance to buy it on a public offering issued by Goldman Sachs, we would have gotten a raw deal and these guys would have had control of the physical. The most fascinating thing is that Satoshi issued these via proof of work. He said, 'Listen, what's the currency of the universe? Energy. If you got energy, you can get yourself some bitcoins. I'm not going to, I don't know who you are. I don't care who you are, where you live, how tall you are, the color of your eyes, the religious beliefs you have, what gender you are. None of that matters. Energy in, energy out.' And proof of work was a fair and honest way where he somehow distributed to the people. If you look at the 21 million Bitcoin supply, and obviously we've almost chewed through all that issuance, almost all of the Bitcoin is owned by the people. And that is why I don't think it's far too late for Wall Street or anybody to try and control this thing because they don't have the physical and they can't get the physical from us. They can't say, 'Oh, well, you know, Bitcoin's taking off and everyone's going to have to deposit it to us or else how are you going to use it in an economy growing to billions of people online?' We would tell them, 'Fuck you. I don't need you at the end of the day to use the protocol. I don't need you to help me store it. I don't need you to help me send it. And there's nothing you can do about it.' And if you try and aggressively tax it, tax me on it. If you try and aggressively take it from me, how are you going to take 12 words out of my brain? That's the other fascinating, the embedded level of property rights that Bitcoin has. If I have a bunch of gold in a room over there, well, if someone puts a gun to my head and says that gold is mine, and they put a bullet through my brain, they kill me, they walk away with my gold. If I have 12 words in my brain, the only way to guarantee you can't get my Bitcoin is by killing me. You got to keep me alive if you want my Bitcoin. So the level of embedded property rights and distribution to the people, we all of you guys listening to this podcast, we all have the asset and there's nothing they can do about it. Now, when I first got into Bitcoin, did I think that Bitcoin had a chance of failing? 100%. If the government aggressively tried to attack it when the block reward, block subsidy was 50 bitcoins and we had barely gotten into the issuance of this monetary policy, yeah, I think we would have had some problems because if they aggressively came after us and tried to concentrate the physical supply, but you cannot price suppress and price control an asset where you don't have all of the physical. Bitcoin is too freely traded and too distributed to the people. We do not need you holding our asset and we do not need your derivative contracts and exchanges. We can settle between each other and we the people have the physical. That is why ultimately why gold failed is because it was useless in a modern economy sitting under your bed. How the hell am I supposed to order DoorDash? I had to deposit it to a bank and one day my IOU wasn't an IOU anymore. And so anyway, I hope that lands and gets you fired up and makes sense. Bitcoin, the huge innovation relative to gold is it's both a monetary asset which is better. Monetary policy is better, literally fixed in supply. I mean, gold, I can't submit a pull request. I can't submit a feature to gold. Gold is gold. It's just a fucking rock Mother Nature made. Bitcoin is we engineered it to be perfect. So as a monetary asset, it's better, it's lighter, it's cheaper to store, it's cheaper to receive, it's faster, it has a harder monetary policy, it's engineered to be better. We can engineer it forever. We can change it. We can improve it. We could test it. Like I said, I cannot submit a feature request to gold. Gold is just going to be gold. The part that gold is entirely missing is a monetary network. Human beings are the monetary network. Very limiting, ultimately not going to work in an economy of billions of people that crosses oceans and borders and all sorts of other constraints. Bitcoin has a monetary network and Satoshi Nakamoto, God bless him, somehow found a way to distribute it fairly to the people. He didn't go to Goldman Sachs and IPO it. Somehow by the time all of these smart economic hedge fund douchebags figured it all out, we already got it. We already got it. And the last thing before I cut myself out on this rant, when people say, you know, oh, don't you guys don't sell your bitcoins to Wall Street. I mean, ultimately, we all, all of us individuals are going to have to realize some of this wealth. You borrow against it, but ultimately trading your bitcoins in for a house, for a car, for a boat, for a plane, whatever, for a sports team. But you know, the fascinating, the philosophical view I have on this is that all of us, we the people have this asset. And the rest of the world is going to increasingly need it. And I love nothing more than a Wall Street douchebag that has to wire my customer, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars for a little tiny portion of their stack of coins or whatever, whatever it is to you, you know, but you can think of the world right now. There's a lot of legacy wealth. They own a lot of houses and real estate and cars and planes and boats and sports teams and monuments. And we the Bitcoiners are going to exchange. We'll take some of those from you and you can have a little bit of sats, but you know, we put in the proof of work. We ensured that this asset was fairly distributed. We are building companies like Strike and podcasts like the Jack Mallers Show to make sure that the education is accessible and it's there and all of this stuff is humanized and understandable so that we cannot get paper derivative price suppression nonsense that we're not going to be tricked into depositing. So I think it's, David, my honest, I think it's just too late. The people have the physical and there's no reason for us to ever need to deposit it to the government for any reason. I think it's too late. I think it's too late. Satoshi found a way. By the time the rest of the world figured it out, all the bitcoins were gone. That's the other. I mean, the genius of incentivizing having the block reward get cut in half every four years is so genius because you're incentivizing everyone to go now. It can't be like, I'll just see if it works. Seeing if it works. If it works, there's none left, right? It's like, you know, if I'm hosting a party and I say, you know, hey, there's going to be food on the table. Whenever you're hungry, don't worry about it. Just go make yourself a plate. Okay. Well, whenever I'm hungry, no need to rush. No need to go. Now, if I say increasingly, like in the first 10 minutes, a lot of food is going to be out there. And then as time goes by, less and less food where, you know, in a half hour to an hour, all the food's gone. Even if you're not starving right now, in case you get hungry, you better get up there and get a little bit or else you're going to be starving and it's all going to be gone. So, just the ingenious of using proof of work, fair distribution, and a monetary policy to entice early speculators to come in and, hey, I can't afford to wait to see if this thing worked. Anyway, I just, I love it, Satoshi. The levels of genius is astounding, is the most impressive thing I've ever heard of or seen ever. And I think it's too late. We all, we, the people own the physical. It's too late. What? Saylor, Saylor is the king of Bitcoin. He's got what, 3% of the supply. It's a tiny. In order to do any, you know, in order to do anything like what they did to precious metals, you need 30, 40, 50% of the asset. I mean, nobody's got nearly, the people have it. All right, I'm looking at the clock. That was a 15-minute answer. I got to shut my mouth. I really appreciate the support, David. Awesome question. Let us know in the comments if that answered it. I hope that was helpful. All right, next question. Let's go. How do I pronounce this? E-L-S-I-E. Elsie. Elsie. I don't know. I hope I said that right. Let's go. Let's find Elsie for the second question. Here we go.
