2035, I think, is when you start to project in your predictions that you might hit this huge explosion in Bitcoin's dollar pricing because the dollar collapses. So what is your catalyst for that actually happening?
Actually, it'll happen almost overnight when it happens. I think first the retailers are going to say, 'Hey, we accept Bitcoin,' and that'll happen for a while. Then the first few retailers will say, 'We only accept Bitcoin.' When that happens, people will go, 'Wait, wait, wait. I can't spend dollars here.' And they'll run to the bank and get all their dollars out, turn it into Bitcoin. The first ones who run to the bank are going to be great beneficiaries, but the rest of them will be clawing at the banks trying to get their money out, and by then the dollar will be worthless.
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All right, we are back with one of the biggest names in the venture capital game, legendary investor Tim Draper on Coinage. Tim, it's good to see you, sir.
Fantastic. Great to be back on the show.
Sorry, the other one got cut off. Yeah, last time we had you on, you know, batteries die sometimes on phones. You know how it goes. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm glad to have you back on. And I think this time around there's a lot more to dig into because before you cut off, I had no idea you were so interested in the idea of tokenizing the creator economy and certainly something near and dear to our hearts here at Coinage. So want to get into what you've been doing with Draper TV on Pump.fun. But first, just want to start with kind of where your head's at right now in the wider space of crypto down in DC. Big debate going on around the Clarity Act and obviously you have a huge price target for Bitcoin eventually hitting a million dollars in the near term. So want to throw it to you, Tim, just to start, kind of what do you make of the markets and where we're at right now?
Yeah, my current prediction is two years, 250,000. So, I'm not saying a million. That won't happen for a little while, but yeah, I'm wearing my Bitcoin tie. I'm very excited about it. I am really in it for the long haul. I always have been. When things are great, I'm in it for the long haul. When things are bad, I'm in it for the long haul. It's really like we are going through a transformational period right now in Bitcoin and we're seeing the world eventually is going to want this because everything can be done on the blockchain. You can build everything in smart contracts. All of these middle people who are creating friction to our world economy, the lawyers, the accountants, the bookkeepers, the tax collectors, whatever, they're all unnecessary in a Bitcoin economy. And so I have sort of a north star I'm headed for. And I feel very good about it. I feel like we're going through a major anthropological change and we're going to go through all sorts of fits and starts and big cyclicality and all sorts of changes from fear to greed to fear to greed. And I suspect that it will take a number more cycles before we completely transform the economy where people use Bitcoin rather than dollars. But it's going to take software that all runs as easily as the dollar runs now. And getting people to change their behavior just takes time.
And then you asked a little bit about Pump.fun.
I love the idea. We have a show. It's called Meet the Drapers. And we experiment all the time with the show. And the most recent show we did was with Pump.fun where we did the whole thing live and we allowed people to participate. So, what Pump.fun is, is kind of a fan participation thing where you can buy or sell or whatever into the ownership of a token that really is just an emotion. It's like, 'Hey, I'm in Britney Spears fan club' or Taylor Swift or One Direction or whatever. It's the same kind of thing, but in this case, it's like a fan club of entrepreneurs and venture capital through Meet the Drapers. And our show reaches millions and millions of people. The reach is 300 million, but I think like 10 million people see the show and they're all starting to think, 'Hey, this is a fun thing.' And doing it live, something I've noticed because usually they cut it up, the show is actually funnier. It's actually more fun to watch because we make all these mistakes or all sorts of weird stuff happens and those are the things that get cut out. And the series has always been kind of a little bit edited and now even though it's live, we do it live, they edit it later before they put it out there. Now it's just live in real time and Pump.fun was fun. We're also talking to a couple of others that are going to keep changing up the show and we just do it. And Pump.fun has fun in the name. So we're kind of happy with that.
Well, I want to talk with you about that later on as we get into it and maybe even play a clip of the live that you did on Pump.fun, too. Because certainly for us and our model in the way of kind of ownership goes back to kind of what I think Bitcoin was good at, which certainly speculation, a very big important piece of crypto. The other thing that I love about crypto is the value accruing to users of a network. It's kind of what Bitcoin's famous for. You buy the token, you use the token and the value goes back to the people using it which is beautiful. And I think the cool thing about something else I've heard you talk about which is getting debated in the Clarity Act right now is what is legal to do in that vein versus what is not. And for years the SEC has sued anybody who's ever tried to do anything like that. Our model, which we can get into later, very similar in letting someone buy a membership token and own a part of a show as we're doing here. We're a community-owned media outlet.
Fun. Oh that's great. Oh, you're smart. So we're built as a US co-op and so the interesting thing with that is we've experimented with Pump.fun tokens or not Pump.fun tokens, we've experimented with meme coins. Sometimes price goes down, ours is actually up 200% since we launched because the key thing, you can pay dividends back to people, patronage dividends, legally in the US. And so our NFT holders have unlocked those.
And what is a patronage dividend? Somebody, if you keep coming back you get a dividend or you keep...
Yeah. So, it's like I don't know if you've shopped at REI before, but REI is a co-op. And the way that it works is if you're an active member of a co-op, you can unlock a patronage dividend. Every year you get money back from the business. To us, that was the huge unlock for how to actually build DAOs legally on chain here in the US. We've gone down to the crypto task force and it's a massive unlock because it solves the issue that hit all these other projects in '22, '23, '24. They got sued by Gary Gensler's SEC. And I think it does something that most meme coins cannot do, which is rather than just allow people to speculate, buy and sell, it actually lets them become a member that can earn from the ongoing success of a creator, a business, things like that. So I think it's a little bit distinct.
That's great. You know, I talked to Jim Whitaker who started REI and he created this hundred million dollar business. Fantastic. So, interestingly on Meet the Drapers, we did allow the biggest token holders to come pitch me. So, they get a one minute or 30 second pitch and the top token holders end up being able to pitch me on their wild ideas. So, that's a win-win. It's a win for me because I get to see another entrepreneur and it's a win for them because they get to be a part of the whole building of the Draper economy.
Yeah, I think that's the exciting thing about building flywheels like this is that you can kind of start to tokenize things and certainly even we've seen it go as high as the president in trying to figure out how do you actually start to tokenize some of the unlocks in the network effects that you've built. But one of the other things...
Yeah, I'm very glad that finally we're starting to allow the individual to participate in these new kinds of opportunities because it's been 80 years since they put those laws in place that were supposed to protect the individual investor, the accredited investor. All they've done is they've kept the poor poor and the rich rich. I think it's time to sort of take down that barrier and it's starting to happen and this administration is much more open to new kinds of financial innovation. So I'm excited about what could potentially happen out there.
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that too in terms of the Clarity Act because as you see these things merging and I know your VC is pretty active in terms of tapping into certainly being one of the early investors in Coinbase, tapping into the frontier of really where this technology is going and one of those things is getting tokenization done right. For a long time VCs would invest maybe get tokens that aren't tied to the actual ownership in the entity, those would get dumped on retail sometimes, incentives are misaligned in that model. What is kind of the exciting upgrade you're most optimistic for if the Clarity Act is to get passed that some of these rules finally get laid out as you said. Is it more for the little guy or what do you expect that's going to change?
