What I said yesterday in the big opening statement was that I always believed that there would be a virtual world and a physical world, and I thought the virtual world was where all the virtual money would be. And now it's very clear that Bitcoin is actually potentially going to eclipse fiat currencies because it's just better.
And if that's going to be the case, then first of all, if you manage a family and the money in a family, you should make sure that you have enough Bitcoin to keep your family alive for about six months. If you manage a business, you're personally liable for at least two weeks, and in Europe, it's like a year of all your employees getting their salaries. So, you should hold a bunch of Bitcoin there. And if you're a government, you should probably hold some Bitcoin in case you have hyperinflation in your fiat currency.
And the reason I say all this is that it's very likely that we will have a period where first the retailers say we accept Bitcoin. That's starting to happen. I mean, Bitcoin went off into the DeFi world for a while and it'll continue doing that. Finance and commerce have to be completely reinvented and they are in the process of being reinvented. And now with things like the Lightning Network being faster than a Visa transaction, and all the options and things you can do with Bitcoin, retailers will start accepting it. And then there will be a point where retailers are saying, 'My Bitcoin's doing a lot better than the dollars.'
At first, they're going to think, 'Oh, the Bitcoin is just something I'm using as a conduit. People want to pay in Bitcoin. I'm going to grab it and I'm going to convert it back to dollars so I can use it in my business.' Well, eventually they're going to be going, 'God, if I had just held on to this Bitcoin, it would have really worked out for me. So, I'm taking Bitcoin and I'm holding it.' And then the next thing they'll do is they'll say, 'I'm only taking Bitcoin.'
And then the consumer is going to go to that store and go, 'Oh, I have to have Bitcoin.' So, they'll buy some Bitcoin, sell some dollars, buy some Bitcoin, and buy things in the store. And then there will be a moment when the consumer says, when there are enough retailers saying this, that the consumer says, 'I got to get all my dollars out of the bank because I've got to put it into Bitcoin because all these retailers, I can buy my food, my clothing, my shelter all in Bitcoin, and I better go do that.' And then they'll do it. And then word spreads super fast.
When Silicon Valley Bank was going out of business, the run on the bank, it was Thursday. They basically ran out of money. The word got out Thursday at 9:00. They ran out of money Thursday at 11:00. So, the word spread that fast. Okay. So, if there's a run on the banks, it will move that fast. So you want to be able to hold money in Bitcoin so that when that happens, and it's a nonzero chance, people always use that term, that this happens, you want to have enough Bitcoin in your business, your governmental account so that you are not being the one clawing at the bank when it's 11:00 and all the money is gone.
So, you know, the reason I think about this is my dad when I was about 10 years old, he gave me a million dollar bill. I went, 'Whoa, a million dollars. What can I do with it?' And he goes, 'Nothing.' I said, 'What do you mean nothing? It's a million dollars.' He said, 'That's a million Confederate dollars. The Confederates lost the war to the Union. The Union dollars were the ones in favor, the way Bitcoin might be in the future.'
And so they inflated the Confederate dollars. They printed more and more and more in hopes that, you know, it went from one to one to then it was like five Confederate dollars to one Union dollar and then it was a hundred and it was a million and then pretty much then it was completely worthless. And I think the same thing could happen with fiat money. Once we realize that, hey, we can operate all of our businesses without the friction of government or the banks, we're going to all be better off.
I mean, every time I walk by one of these banks or big government office for the Fed or whatever, I think, 'Wow, look at that big, beautiful building. It's glass and steel and all those very sharp-looking, well-dressed people coming out of it, getting into their very nice cars.' And I think they're basically a friction item on our economy. And if that's all done in software, we don't really need them. Maybe as advisors, but we don't really need them all. And that's going to change the nature of our economy.
Way back when, people shifted from shells to gold to the promise of gold. Every time there was one of those changes, we had an anthropological leap forward and everybody got richer. And how does that work? Well, it's kind of like the way water works. Water comes down and if you conserve it, this is a weird thing because all these people saying, 'Oh, we got to conserve our water.' Huge mistake, by the way. You got to conserve our water so then no one can use it. It's sitting right there. But if you use the water, it goes back into the water table, comes back out. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You can, you know, it's like running five showers in a row in the time you would have just run one shower.
So the frictionless economy will operate the same way. If we have less friction, the money will move faster. So we will all be five times richer, if you're using the water example. So, it's the use of the money that improves everybody's world. And this is all based on a capitalist philosophy. And that is that if you and I do a deal, we're both better off. And we can do more deals because if money is moving faster.
If you have, now with all the AI, if you have robots, let's say you have 50 robots in an assembly line, they all come from different companies, and you don't know how to pay the robots. The only way you could possibly pay them would be in Bitcoin, would be in some cryptocurrency. You have to move the money from one thing to another.
I mean, I think we're at the right conference. You know, it just feels like we are. The one fear I have is if this cataclysmic event happens and people run on the banks to get Bitcoin, I mean, they get their dollars out and then buy Bitcoin. We the Bitcoin holders are going to have to support all those people who didn't listen to us for the 20 years. I don't know. I've been saying, I've been wearing this tie for a long time and I've told friends and they say, 'Oh, I should have bought Bitcoin when you told me to.' And I said, 'Well, you still should buy some Bitcoin.' But a lot of those friends are going to be like no money, lose their house, lose their... you got to think in terms of we are going to have to be the benevolent, you know, the people who become benevolent in that scenario because it will happen as fast as the Silicon Valley Bank run happened. We can communicate super fast. Social media goes boom. We all know.
So, if we have some event like that, it's going to be tough on the people who didn't, for whatever it is, 18 years, still didn't really listen and say, 'I guess I should buy some of this.' So, tell all your friends, tell all your relatives, make sure that they have enough Bitcoin to survive for six months. Just a good idea generally.
Yeah, Bitcoin's great because it's not subject to political whims. The government can, you know, our government can just print money. Oh, hey, we're going to start a war, build a wall, do whatever. We're going to provide health care to the world. We're going to do this, you know, we're going to open the borders, we're going to whatever they do, they tend to overspend. And if they overspend, then it's a hidden tax. We get inflation because they've printed more money. So like if you have a dollar and the government decides that they are going to spend twice what they have, suddenly your dollar is worth 50 cents. That's not true of Bitcoin. There are only 21 million of them in the world.
I don't know what that is in Satoshis. It's like in the quintillions or something. There are a lot of Satoshis in the world. But there are only 21 million times plus eight decimals. I don't know what that ends up being. Somebody knows, right?
I'll tell you, if I were the banking community, I'd be flipping out about the quantum risk. The banks are. I mean, if I've got a quantum computer, I can hack a bank like that. But if I've got a quantum computer and I'm looking at Bitcoin, I become a miner. And if I become a miner, I start mining and I'm getting all this Bitcoin, but I'm also watching the blockchain. That's what they do, right? They mine for Bitcoin and they watch the blockchain. Well, so the next one that comes in, if they want to come hack it, we've already got a huge defense against it. So, okay, worst comes to worst, the first guy with a quantum computer comes in there and wants to hack Bitcoin, we can roll it back. It's happened before. We can roll the blockchain back.
So this is one of those things the press, 'Oh, sky is falling, it's going to all be horrible.' Whatever it is, it's going to be horrible for banks. I don't know, my Bitcoin hasn't been hacked but my bank has been hacked. My bank account has been hacked and they couldn't make me whole. I mean think of what's going to happen when their quantum computers go in there. That's something to worry about. You worried about Bitcoin? Are you kidding me? It's way better technology than they've got in the banks.
So, you know, I love all the non-issues the press throws out at us. And then it's like, okay, yeah, we have to explain that the world is moving in our direction and you know, we're way more advanced than what is existing out there. And right now there's a lot more money in the banks than there is in Bitcoin. So, you know, if you're a thief, if you're North Korea, by the way, socialism generates thieves. It's a bad idea. It's a bad idea for a zillion reasons, but it is a really bad idea because North Korea is like a den of thieves. They're all thieves and it's all because of the leadership being socialist and they're all dirt poor. It's a horrible place to be. Yeah.
