#464: Mitch Garber on Understanding Bitcoin

I've been in more lucky situations during the pandemic than not. At the same time, you have to have a lot of empathy because the whole world is not in the cloud; the whole world is not Chamath [Palihapitiya], and David Sacks, and Elon Musk, and Pomp; the whole world is not in Bitcoin and blockchain; the world is construction workers, restaurant owners, hotel workers, service people, [and] stuck at home school teachers.

I don't think I've met a single person who did the work to educate themselves and be able to talk intelligently about Bitcoin who didn't say 'Yeah, there's a good chance this works.' Maybe they're not a full-on Bitcoiner, maybe they've got some concerns or questions, but nobody walks away and says 'This is really stupid, I can't believe anyone believes in it, and it's going to 0.'

I don't know a Bitcoiner who isn't praying the price goes down ... Bitcoiners have this deep-seated long-term belief that the U.S. dollar value [of Bitcoin] is going to continue to rise. They actually want the price to go down in the short-term, though, so they can get more of it.

Almost every great technology is first adopted by the fringes of society—beepers, cell phones, Internet. It's this constant cat and mouse game between law enforcement and bad actors; they're constantly looking for new technology to skirt law enforcement. So, it's actually a positive sign, if you look at it from a technology adoption standpoint, that those are the people who first adopted Bitcoin because it's kind of the natural progression.

That kind of certainty and predictability of a programmatic monetary policy is really unique because it then says, if we want to determine future price movements, we simply have to model demand rather than model supply and demand. I think that's one thing that Bitcoin has as an advantage over other assets—the supply side is held kind of programmatically and predictably, and therefore, the focus then shifts to just the demand side, not the supply and demand side, like in traditional assets.

About 45% of Americans hold no investable assets—no stocks, no bonds, no anything.

I personally believe that every stock, bond, currency, and commodity will be digitized in the future.