Bitcoin Halving: What Does it Mean?

Andrew Brill 0:00
Hello and welcome to Wealthion. I’m your host Andrew Brill. As Bitcoin continues to inch higher many of you have asked what is and how to invest in crypto. So we’ve decided to put together a crypto 101 if you will to explain what crypto is all about and we’ll discuss that right now.

I’d like to welcome in a person who is very familiar with Wealthion he’s the host of speak up right here on this channel. He’s also the founder and Managing Partner of Skybridge Capital and the founder and chairman of SALT which is a global thought leadership forum and venture studio

Anthony, Welcome to Wealthion as a guest and not a host.

Anthony Scaramucci 0:45
Well, I love it. Okay. And you know what I what I love about you is you are in a House of Pain like me every year okay, and no, just let viewers and listeners know you know what the best thing about being a Mets fan is the month of November to February, Andrew the month of November, the February, the optimistic months exactly the optimistic months when they’re tied for first place.

Andrew Brill 1:12
With you winning the offseason doesn’t exactly translate, but we’ll take it at some point. You know, Anthony, a lot of our viewers have been questioning since Bitcoin has gone from I don’t know 43,000 Back in January to now over 70,000 You know, what is crypto? We’ve heard a lot about Bitcoin. We know there’s other coins out there, you have this wonderful book, the sweet life with Bitcoin. And I have thumbed through it and read it. And it’s fascinating. But we wanted to give our viewers an overview of crypto, what it is how it works. I know that when Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that paper, if he’s even a real person, or as you say in the book, it could be three people. It was a peer to peer platform where people could exchange things for value. And cryptocurrency was supposed to be that is crypto currency, actually a currency?

Anthony Scaramucci 2:07
Okay, so this is a fantastic discussion. I really do appreciate you bringing me on, but I’m gonna go way down to the base layers and provide some historical context so that people can understand why I’m in it. Okay, in 2012, someone introduced me to Bitcoin, I think these coins were trading south of $100. Maybe they were $150, something like that. I listened to the presentation, and then I put out a tweet. Bitcoin is nonsense. Caveat mTOR. So I just given you a sense for how knowledgeable I was and how skeptical I was in remember, Andrew, I’ve been in traditional finance for 36 years. And so at that time, it was 26 years. And I thought that this was ridiculous. How could a chain of numbers and letters a crypto graph on the internet be worth anything? How could that even be possible? And then I’m going to fast forward you to 2014 where the Winklevosses came to see me at the salt conference, you mentioned our conference, they made this wonderful presentation about Bitcoin and it was eye opening to me and we’re going to get into the presentation in a second. They came off stage and said, Well, what do you think now? I said, Well, look, it’s an interesting, compelling presentation. My clients will never buy it. There’ll be afraid of it. I’m an institutional investor. I can’t under any circumstances, buy this Bitcoin is a $300. And then a very faithful thing happened to me. I was in the White House. And this happened to me on a Wednesday and the reason I know that Andrew, I was only there for one Wednesday, so it was a Wednesday. And these two fed guys came in to see me and they wanted to talk about the digitization of the US dollar. So the digitization of the US dollars it Yes. On the blockchain a blockchain I mean, this is like Bitcoin. Yes. Well, it would be a different blockchain and Bitcoin but yes, it would be on the blockchain. And then I said to myself, Okay, I am really missing the boat. This is a new technology. This is something that we’re going to be using and I really got to get up to speed. Well, shortly thereafter, I’m fired. I leave the White House and then I buy the URL SkybridgeBitcoin.com. And I spend two years researching and studying Bitcoin. Meeting with people read this Nakamoto white paper met with computer programmers met with people that were already in the business. And Andrew still I did not buy a Bitcoin. Why did I not buy bitcoin? Because I’m an institutional investor, for high net worth clients and institutions. And I was afraid. I was like, Okay, this could knock me out of business. If this is wrong. It’s extremely volatile, and people don’t understand it. And then I started reading about technological adoption curves. I started reading about the people who were in horse and buggies. And they did not want horseless carriages. I started reading about the people that were tapping out Morse code, and they really didn’t understand this device where they could talk through it. And people that thought radio was bunkum, and then they thought, Okay, well, TV is bunkum, and who the hell would watch a motion picture with sound? Why would these talkies work? And you go through life, and you see that there’s a resistance to new technology. Then there’s an adaption there’s an exception, acceptance, and then there’s a scaling of it. And so, what is Bitcoin? What is the blockchain? What are cryptocurrencies and so put very, very simply, we have figured out a way using a network of computers to verify transactions. And so right now, if I’m going to buy your house or that studio, you and I are going to negotiate a price. People in general enter, they don’t like or trust each other. So what ends up happening is, we get a price, you say, Okay, this is my corresponding bank, here’s the wiring instructions for my account at my bank, I then take money from my bank account, and I wire it to your bank account, your bank notifies you that you got the money, you hand me the deed to the studio. That’s a third party verifying a transaction between you and me. What these guys figured out over the blockchain using electricity and using a network of computers. So they could have this fully distributed ledger, this fully distributed spreadsheet that can verify these transactions Sanctify these transactions without a third party. Okay, so third party we say that’s trusted. But the blockchain is truth. Okay, it’s just just truth. Okay. You know, the muddy cheese once in a while, when they when they when they took over the double ledger accounting once in a while, they say, Andrew, you know, you you wrote in that accounting book 100. But Anthony wrote 200, and I’m the verifier. I wrote 200 Pay Anthony 200. Right. That’s trust, verification. And truth is, Andrew put up 100. Anthony said it was 100, they crossed the value over the blockchain, fully transparent, fully distributed, and therefore it is completely sanctified. So this is an incredible technology once you understand it, and and I’ll start with the fact that we spend $7 trillion a year globally, in financial services and banking. So we’re verifying our transactions with each other using banks, they charge us fees for that. And we we spend globally $7 trillion. Imagine we went to a system where we didn’t have to spend that money anymore, we could just go from your wallet into my wallet verified by the blockchain. And then a result of which we don’t have to spend the $7 trillion anymore. give you two examples very quickly. And then we can talk about Bitcoin if you want. So example number one is I own a restaurant called The Hunt and Fish Club. 85 90% of the bills in the hunt and fish club are paid by credit card. The credit card vendors charge us anywhere from three to three and a half percent for these transactions. If we could do a wallet to Wallet transfer, Andrew Brill walks into the restaurant, he has a bill, he turns to the waiter and he says well, what’s your wallet, I’m going to send you a US dollar a stable coin to your wallet from my wallet, we can avoid the three and a half percent charge from the credit card company. Now these restaurants make about 15% gross margin. If the if the if we can save the three and a half percent. That’s a 25% increase in the gross margins of the restaurant. We can put that into food we can put that into service, higher quality decor. And I’m just telling you, there’s a day coming where the $7 trillion is going to be replaced by the blockchain and and I know you believe me because we’re doing this right now costless, we’re having this phone call. And we’re have this video hookup like the Jetsons. And it’s not costing us any money, because we paid a monthly charge for the pipe to run this thing through. I’m older than you. And you may remember this pretty sure you might if you were in Europe in the mid 80s. It was $5 a minute to call mom and dad you had to go to the mail, the post office in Rome, they’d give you a card you’d go into a little booth you call the AT and T operator and they would click off the phone after five minutes. And you’d spend $25 making that call. Today you can go to any cafe in Rome hook into their Wi Fi Call mom and dad Voice over IP, no dollars. So the world is going to change again, as it relates to transactions. And so, but that requires scaling that requires building the network. And so I wrote down in my diary, I said, Okay, if bitcoin gets to 100 million wallets, I mean, there’s 100 million people on earth that are using Bitcoin. I’m going to make my first investment. If I’m comfortable with the regulation in the United States, I’m going to make my first investment. And then lastly, if I’m going to buy it for clients, and therefore I’m going to spend nine figures on Bitcoin, I have to store these codes, have to store these coins someplace on a computer, that’s safe, that’s in cold storage, that’s protected somewhere. And so when that started happening in late 2020, I made my first purchases of Bitcoin October, November of 2020. And then I went out and told my clients that we own Bitcoin for them. Some of them said, I’m firing you were crazy. Some of them said, What the hell is Bitcoin? And some of them said, that’s interesting. I’d like to learn more. Nobody was happy, by the way, and I mean, nobody. And so I wrote that little books, tiny pamphlets, maybe 100 pages to send to my clients. So I say, Okay, listen, this is all the research that I did from 2017 When I got fired from the White House, to today, and I’m gonna put it in a pamphlet, please read it. And oh, by the way, the white paper that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote is a very simplistic thing. Some of the biggest ideas we both know that some of the biggest ideas are the simplest. So if you read the book and read the white paper and you want to learn more, okay, come sit with me will tell you more now, I can say and this is my last I’m sorry, being so long winded but if you if you do the research on Bitcoin and you do the research on Bach, Blockchain, you go towards Bitcoin, and you go towards the blockchain, I have yet to meet an intellectual smart securities analyst, someone that I spent the time and energy to understand it is oh, okay, that sucks. Let me put out a tweet like Anthony did in 2012. Bitcoin is nonsense, Caveat emptor. I don’t know anybody. Paul Tudor Jones, legendary billionaire investor owns Bitcoin. Stanley Druckenmiller, he broke the British pound 1992 legendary billionaire investor, he owns Bitcoin. Larry Fink told me in a hotel lobby, in 2022. I don’t like Bitcoin, and I think you’re a dummy to own it and something like that. It was very derogatory. I said, like, you got to do the homework. Okay, he did the homework to this man’s credit. He’s one of the smartest people in investment management. He has the largest asset management group in the world. Definitely in the United States, and possibly the world. I’m talking about retail and wholesale institutional $11 trillion under management, dislike Bitcoin in 2022, filed for an ETF application in January of 2023. Once he did the homework once he understood it, and now he has the most successful ETF offering launch in the history of ETFs. And the symbol is ibid. And I’m very proud to tell people on wealthy on that skybridge was the first money into that so so the young men, that orange pill, this is an expression we use in Bitcoin, where we orange pill, somebody, it’s from the matrix, where you get them to believe what is actually happening and where the future lies. The young men at Black Rock that orange pilled, Larry, they came to me and my partner, Brett Messonnier said, Okay, listen, he’s not going to do this unless we can get outside money. It’s just the way he is. Would you guys be willing to help us start this trust? And we looked at him and said, Yeah, absolutely. We sent him $10 million. They got the trust, or they applied for the ETF application, and this January that ETF application got approved. And so now you were mentioning 43,000 to 71,000. What’s happened is there’s a tremendous amount of pent up demand. For Bitcoin. There’s a very limited supply. And this this took off in the last quarter. And I predict it’s gonna go higher, and we can talk about anything you want. I’m sorry, I’m so long winded but I just want to lay the base layer in the framework for people. So they understand it was a skeptic Michael sailor who owns seven or $8 billion of Bitcoin now was a skeptic. Larry Fink was a skeptic. And we all start out cynical and with great deals of skepticism, but I implore viewers and listeners to Please learn about this and get off zero. You know, you know, assume everything I’m saying is bunk and Bitcoin is worthless, that’s okay, put $5,000 in a Bitcoin. You write it off and say, Okay, it’s worthless. Because if we’re, if we’re eight, we’re right, Bitcoin will trade to the market capitalization of gold, which is about 10 to 12 times where it is today. Not going to happen overnight. But I’m talking over a decade and if you’re a long term patient investor, you’ll be well rewarded. Okay, now moving into the conversation, something that will remind you have your wife Andrew, okay, ready? And obviously my wife here it comes I want

Andrew Brill 15:43
Should’ve listened to me. Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci 15:44
My wife bought this for me, and it was a double entendre obviously, because I should have listened to her and everything. But maybe some people should be listening to me on Bitcoin. Okay.

Andrew Brill 15:55
So you Anthony, you talked about the blockchain, obviously, you know, when I when I envision the blockchain I’m I almost look at it, like a strand of DNA with with different things plugged in, explain to me what a block is. So I go into the Hunt and Fish Club, and I go to pay my bill with with cryptocurrency that goes into when the bill goes in to the to the block, and then I have to say, Okay, I’m going to pay that bill with this, that has that has to match and that that block goes into the chain and is secure.

Anthony Scaramucci 16:31
Right. And now you have a cryptographic code, you have your Bitcoin, represented by a 100 million Satoshis, right? So it’s divisible by 100 million Satoshi. So maybe your meal costs a million of those Satoshis $150, or something like that. So the the restaurant says, payable to us, 1 million Satoshis. And Andrew Brill has that message now he can send some of his Bitcoin, some of that code to the restaurant. Now this is very, very important. Because each one of these codes to your point about DNA, they have their own unique thing. AirPrint. Once that code transfers, there’s no ability to do what’s called a double spend. And the best way I can explain that to you is if I wired you $100,000 from my bank account to pay for your studio. And then I said, Oh, okay, let me go wire $100,000 from my bank account again, to pay somebody else. The bank says, What are you doing? We already sent that money to Andrew brill, we can’t send another thing, right. So that’s called a double spend. So with double entry accounting, something that was invented about 1000 years ago, we’re able to keep track of things. Put things very simplistically, your bank is a spreadsheet. But your bank is a database. It’s got Andrew’s account, it’s got Anthony’s account, it’s got wealthy John’s account. And when we want to move things between these accounts, we go to that bank, and we ask them to do it for us. Because we trust that bank that banks regulated, is very smart people in that bank, there’s controllers in the bank, the government comes in there to make sure that the bank is doing it honestly. And a result of which we trust that bank but now we have this technology that will do all of that work for us. It’s the voice over IP. We used to call you know my bell, at&t to make that phone call. But now we have all these pipes and plumbing through the internet. This is how you have to think about the blockchain.

Andrew Brill 18:44
So I had the money the cryptocurrency could be Bitcoin right now Bitcoin one bitcoin is, let’s say $70,000. Or it’s 70,000. That’s split up in my wallet. I can actually use just a portion of that.

Anthony Scaramucci 19:03
You could use that though. Could use one Satoshi.

Andrew Brill 19:06
Okay, so those are actually it’s almost like having $1 That’s split into four quarters or 20. nickels.

Anthony Scaramucci 19:13
If I told you here’s a $1,000 bill, you bring it to the bank, they can chop it up into pennies, right? Yeah. Satoshis are like the pennies of Bitcoin.

Andrew Brill 19:23
And is this going to eventually live on our cell phones? You know, you talk about the wallet, you know, I carry cash in my wallet. Sometimes, you know, I do have kids, so there isn’t much in there. But I have a wallet that’s in my pocket. This isn’t going to be a wallet. It’s in my pocket. How does the wallet work?

Anthony Scaramucci 19:43
So it’s good question. It’s funny because we, we call an email and we always have this little envelope, which dates back to the past and we sent mail to each other right but it’s an electronic transmission of data and communication. And so now, you and I have a leather wallet Our grandkids will have no leather wallet because they won’t need one, right? It’ll all be digitized somewhere. And it’ll likely be on a smartphone. And, you know, there’ll be money on the smartphone. But there’ll be small amounts of money in my prediction on a smartphone, because you don’t want to get sim swapped. You know, you don’t want somebody to come to the phone, hit your phone and take the data and then take your money, you’d be the same way. If they bum rushed you on the street and they pulled your wallet out of your back pocket and took your money. So they’ll always be small amounts of money on the wallet inside the phone. But yes, you’ll have money on your phone, it’ll be likely to be a stable coin. Okay, and the stable coin if you’re in the UK, it’ll be a stable coin tied to the British pound or if you’re in the United States, it’ll be a stable coin tied to the US dollar. And you’ll go into stores and you’ll pay you know, and you’ll have maybe you’ll have Bitcoin, maybe other cryptocurrencies aren’t in your wallet. And you’ll say okay, I got this man wants US dollar. He doesn’t want Bitcoin. Let me convert my bitcoin into the stable coin. Let me send him the stable coin. And again, the stable coin would just again be on the blockchain, different blockchain and the Bitcoin, same technology, same process of verification, fully distributed, Ledger, fully distributed spreadsheet. So this is what tricks people people say, ah, that’s just financial blather. That’s just accounting blather, why would that be worth anything? Well, then you have to examine what money actually is. And I always recommend to people that they read the ascent of money, which was written by Professor Neil Ferguson, you can also watch the BBC documentary that Neil did. And he takes you back 1000s of years to explain what money is in a society and ultimately, money is a technology. We use this technology Andreu to transfer value between ourselves, we don’t want to barter anymore, I don’t go to the the farmers square with my pigs and try to trade them for cows. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t walk into the bar and say, here’s a calf from my farm. That’s your real color. Promise, John, for the next six weeks, give me 17 gin and tonics, we don’t do that. We have a script of paper, or it’s actually made of cloth. Or maybe we had a piece of wampum, but a shiny seashell, or we had a gold coin with a Roman emperors face stamped on it. And we said, Okay, we are going to trust that that’s a piece of value that’s worth something to each of us. If you give me this, I will give you what you want for it. Because I know the thing that you just gave me, I’m able to give to somebody else for what I want for it. Right? And so definitionally that’s money, right? definitionally we can call that currency. Although people have different definitions for money and currency. I like to keep it simple and say they’re roughly the same thing. And so now, I’ll submit to you. And I want you to think about this. If I have a $100 bill in my hand, it’s made out of if you Google what it’s made out of, it’s made out of 75% Cotton, 25% linen. Here’s my $100 Bill, and it’s this big. What is it worth? Well, if you and I were an undergraduate philosophy class, it’s worth nothing. It’s just a piece of cloth that’s got some green on it and an anti counterfeit strip and maybe a president or Ben Franklin on it, I weren’t anything, yet. You and I both know it is worth something might give it to the maitre d, where I give it to the valet or I give it to the salon, they’re happy because they know they can take that slip. And they can give it to somebody else for value. And once you understand exactly what I just said, Well, now you have this property. You have digital property on the internet that people are accepting as value and then it meets all the checklists. And Professor Ferguson’s book. It’s immutable. It’s scarce, it’s unbreakable. Nobody can corrupt it. You know, one of the problems with our money. Andrew, you and I both know this is that the government we trust the government to give us the money. But the government makes more money. You know, the the US dollar has lost 22% of its value since January of 2020. Okay, I just want to repeat that because we, we have people on this show that are listening, they are maybe middle class, maybe they work. They use their time and their energy to make money for themselves. Well, if they got paid $1,000 in 2020, they only have $780 of purchasing power today. You see that and this is what the governments have done for seven theories 1000s of years, they put, you know, iron ore, and then they coated it with silver or coated it with gold, you know, they they put less valuable metals in the currency or they made more on the printing press, or they made more wampum. Okay, and they inflate the money, well, Bitcoin can’t be inflated, it has a fixed supply. And there’ll be never any other bitcoins made ever again. And so when you start to understand that it has all of the DNA, and all of the properties of what man and woman kind of used to transfer value between each other, and you now understand and design a technological platform that the world has embraced known as the internet, you can see where we’re going. And you can also see how this could be a store of value, very similar to the way we deem gold to be a store of value. I can’t eat gold. I can’t. I mean, if I’m using it for manufacturing, or something, yes, but that’s only 5% of the value of it. We have decided in our civilization over 5000 years, that gold is a store of value, and I like gold as an investment. And I always tell people go to GBI buy some gold and have it in an account. And because it’s it’s a very good store of value and gold is at an all time high. But I also like Bitcoin, so I’m not you know, I’ve had Peter Schiff on speak up. He’s a gold guy, he hates Bitcoin. I’m not that I like gold. And I like Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a form of digital gold. And in some ways, our children, people that are 25 to 35 years younger than us will probably choose Bitcoin over gold, because it’s easier to move around. I can’t take $200 million of gold and put it in my pocket. But I can’t take a $200 a $200 million USB of codes and Bitcoin. And I can put that in my pocket. You see what I’m saying?

Andrew Brill 27:13
Yeah, so what Anthony, what do you say to the people? And I know it has to do with public keys and private keys. What do you say that people who are so worried about security and being hacked and and worried that look? Yeah, and it happened early on, when they weren’t being careful. And someone did something silly and someone went bankrupt, they lost $460 million. But what do you say to the people who are so worried about cybersecurity? That they’re like, I’m not going I’m not going near this? Because it’s dangerous.

Anthony Scaramucci 27:46
Okay, so I was there. And everything you just said, I said, from 2012 When I learned about Bitcoin to 2020. So I had an eight year struggle to get myself off of zero. But I would tell those people today, you can store it at fidelity. Today, you can buy it at something called New York digital investment group, you can get a Coinbase account. If you don’t like any of those things, and you’re a traditional investor. Let’s say you’re a baby boomer like me, well, you can buy Larry Fink’s or Kathy woods, or you Pitt, Mike Novogratz is ETF. And what is that? Well, you can go call your broker. Hello, how are you? Yep, I’d like to buy bitcoin. The stock symbol for Black Rocks, Bitcoin ETF as I bid, IB it, they say okay, great, they buy it for you. And you have now that CUSIP number in your account very traditional. So if you bought apple stock, it’s in your account, if you bought Google, it’s in your account. Now you own shares of this ETF, this exchange traded fund whose underlying asset is Bitcoin, you can also do that with gold. You can buy GLD and so what I would tell people that stuff is in cold storage, it’s backed by the company that is storing it for you. They have layers of insurance on it Lloyd’s of London shores a lot of this stuff, they have multiple backup servers to protect you in the in the event of a calamity. We get a New York earthquake larger than 4.8 on the Richter scale, you know, and and it’s there to protect you and make you safe and so you can buy it that way. And I would tell people get off zero. Don’t make the mistake that I made waiting eight years to get off zero, get off zero own a little bit. You don’t have to put your life savings in it or anything like that, but this is going to be part of our future. And I will say this, that there will come a day where For consultants, and there will come a day where tactical asset allocation managers for pension funds will say, my God, I’ve got to have a one to 3% position. In Bitcoin. If I don’t do that I’ll be under invested relative to my peer groups. Okay. And once that happens, you’ll see a very big explosion and very big proliferation of value. And I want my clients to get there before those people. And that’s why I’m recommending it. So. So that’s Bitcoin. There are other things on the blockchain. There’s a gentleman by the name of Vitalik, Buterin, he invented something called the theory them, he changed the software code. And he made it possible so that you could add what’s known as a smart contract on top of the base layer. All right, and so what’s the base layer of the software operating system? It’s a theory them, we call that a layer one, we can then add something on top of that, we call that a layer two, we could add a insurance contract, we could add a a token to buy and sell real estate, we could add a I just bought a theory and based token that gives me title to the basky art self portrait of himself and Andrew Warhol. And Basquiat made this portrait in 1982. It’s sold at auction for $32 million. One of my clients and a very close friend, Henry Chang, lives in Hong Kong, he owns the rosewood hotels, he owns the Baha Mar resort, he’s been an investor of ours forever. He wanted to tokenize this piece of art. And so I bought over the blockchain, okay, which entitles me it’s now in my wallet, I own it, and entitles me to a certain percentage of that piece of art, if he decides, and he says he’s going to do this. He’s 70. When he turned 75, he’s going to put that art back up for auction. And Basquiat and Warhol are both very popular figures in the contemporary art modern art world. And when he does sell that, there’ll be cash replacing the piece of art, and then I can convert my token into that cash. And maybe I convert it into Bitcoin, or maybe I converted into something else. So so this is now going to start to happen, where we tokenize what’s called real world assets, RW A’s. And so things like Aetherium. And things like Solana are also on the blockchain they have been invented to help us process those transactions. And I predict that don’t go by me because Larry thing is a lot smarter than me. Larry Fink says this, And I predict he will be right. He says, we’re going to tokenize everything. So you’re going to buy your stocks and bonds over the blockchain. Right now you buy your stocks and bonds, and there are seven different entities that they go through before they end up in your account. But over the blockchain, you can go peer to peer just like I described other transfers of value. Here’s a tokenized version of Disney stock. I put it up for sale, you agree to buy it, it transacts over the blockchain. Right now, when I joined the illustrious Wall Street to buy a stock we call the T plus five. So if I bought the stock on a Monday, it took five trading days for that stock to eventually enter my account. And we went to T plus three, two, and now we’re at t plus one. But what the blockchain can do is if we move to a blockchain standard for these transactions, it would be t plus zero. Okay, on something like Solana, it could take an hour, 45 Minutes to Transfer. And that’s coming as well. So you have Bitcoin. Then you have other blockchains, you have something called stable coins. Okay, my friend Jeremy or Leia runs something called circle. He has a regulated stable coin, where you can put us dollars up on the blockchain, he’ll give you the stable coins. He’s got a backed by tons of treasuries and tons of assets. So it’s one to one backing. And now you have that and you can use that on a blockchain to transact.

Andrew Brill 34:32
So you said something earlier about Bitcoin and tokens like that, or, or things like that being backed by either the US dollar or the pound or the euro? Is that going to be the case? Or will eventually Bitcoin and those things become their own currency?

Anthony Scaramucci 34:52
So it’s so so it’s a great question. So the only thing I’m willing to say to you on that is I don’t No, I can speculate with you though. And I can say, Bitcoin, to me is digital property, its property on the internet. Could Bitcoin eventually become the standard were we treated as the global currency? And we say, okay, these other currencies, these central banks unfortunately crushed all these other currencies, the US dollar is down 99% in value, since we took it off the gold standard in 1971. So we don’t trust these things anymore. And so now we’re just going to trust the Bitcoin standard. There are people that believe that and there is a great book called The Bitcoin standard by Safa, de and Ahmose. But I’m not there yet. I’m just saying that Bitcoin is store value, it’ll be like gold, and gold at a $16 trillion market capitalization, bitcoins at 1.4 trillion. And I believe it could go up 10 to 12 times from here over the next 10 to 15 years, as a result of which I’m recommending to people that they buy some.

Andrew Brill 36:10
You had said something earlier about, and we’ll get into the halving, there’s only a certain amount of bitcoin to go around. And I know that when you got into Bitcoin, you were kind of watching Metcalfe’s law, and saying, Well, if enough people are using it, it might be worth something. And so you hopped in. Now what happens? And in the book, you say it could go to a billion users by 2025. And we’re fast approaching 2025. Is there enough Bitcoin to go around? Or is that just going to drive the price up?

Anthony Scaramucci 36:41
Yeah, so there isn’t a Bitcoin to go around. Because remember, it’s divisible by Satoshi is 100 million Satoshi. So there’s no no 21 billion. Hopefully, I’m doing the math, right. Satoshis. But, but yes, there’s enough Bitcoin to go around. But it will drive the price up, the price will start to inflate. Because it will be, you know, in large demand. So we’re heading towards mid 24. And we have about 350 to 400 million users right now, we do think that that will double by mid 25. And then if I’m right about that, by the end of 2025, you’ll have approximately 1 billion users and, and so to frame this for you, and viewers and listeners go back to web one, we have about five or 6% adaption globally of Bitcoin, and that would put the web back to 1998 1999. And, you know, we have three or 4 billion people now on the web. You know, I think it’s greater than half of the of the global population, but don’t quote me, but I’m just saying, we’ve got three or 400 million people today, that’s about four or five 6% of the global population. We have, we have a huge opportunity here as this scales and adopts. And it will be used and will be used. Okay, I submit this to you, we can’t predict the future, Andrew, but we can, we can observe the past. And so just imagine, you’re sitting at your fat box computer in 1998. And you have a dial up modem underneath your desk, and it’s wearing and burning and catching a dial tone. And it’s going to now log into the internet. And then it takes 35 seconds for your AOL landing page to arrive. And you can use it for email, you may want to go to a website known as eBay to buy a Pez gun, or you may want to go to Amazon to buy a book. Okay, but that’s sort of where this is right. And it’s clunky. And there’s people writing about it saying, you know, the internet is a fad. But what have I been in 25 years later. So oh, by the way, we’re going to be using this on thin screen computers, we’re going to have the smartphones we hold in our hands that have more technology than what landed people on the moon in the 1970s. And oh, by the way, we’re going to do trillions and trillions of dollars of transactions on this thing known as the internet. And there’ll be billions and billions of people downloading 4k, or now 8k video on the internet. And you know, people will be delivering things to your house, something called DoorDash, you’ll be sharing rides around urban areas called Uber. And there will be this explosion of social media. All these things are going to happen in the ensuing 25 years and trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth is going to be created. That’s where we are right now on what we’re calling web three. That’s where we are right now and what we’re calling the blockchain technology, and believe it or not, back in 1998. There were skeptics and people said this is a bunch of bunk I’m not buying Amazon. It’s a high price book seller is about interbank I’m not gonna buy eBay, I have no interest in Google. Okay, and they miss these technologies and they miss this growth. So I’m trying to tell people, okay, you may have missed that don’t miss this. And, and again, you don’t have to buy a lot of it. But get off zero buy some of it.

Andrew Brill 40:19
Right. So talk to me Anthony about the I know we’re running up against time but about the halving everybody’s like oh my god, my my wallet is going to be cut in half. And no, that’s not actually the case. It has nothing to do with what you already own. It just has to do with what’s coming up in the future.

Anthony Scaramucci 40:36
Yeah, lots of information about the halving. I’m glad that you brought it up. So. So what if you read the white paper. And again, I believe it was a group of computer programmers that developed this together. They named it Satoshi Nakamoto. But I believe it was a group of people. But if you read the white paper, what they said is we’re going to have this nodal system. And these nodes are going to verify the transactions that are taking place. And I think there’s about 100 plus 1000 nodes. Now, you can have your own node, you can go on to bitcoin.org and download their software. And then you could have your, your your computer helping the system, keep and verify these transactions. And so in order to incentivize people to do that, and Nakamoto says, you know, this may catch on, you may want to buy some, this may catch on. And he said, but in order to incentivize people to be on the system to help us verify all of these transactions, every day, we’re gonna give out some bitcoin. And so we have 21 million coins, they released a huge amount of them in the beginning, I can’t exactly remember at this moment, what it was. And then they said, when we get to a certain level of blocks transacted, we’ll cut that amount in half. And so we’re going to reduce the supply of Bitcoin that comes into the network, roughly every four years. And so, four years ago, there were 1800 coins coming into the network, per day. And those coins were at lower prices $1,000 A coin $2,000 A coin. But what what the Nakamoto programmers felt was going to happen is if the coin went up in value, well, they wouldn’t have to put out as many coins, right, you have to put out less coins at 71,000 than you do at, you know 1000. And so they predicted that what would happen is as these halvings took place, there’ll be less supply in the marketplace. And because there would be increased exponential people on the network to be way more demand and less supply coming into the marketplace. So when somebody says that having it doesn’t mean that the supply is being cut in half, meaning there’s 21 million coins, there’s probably a million and a half or so coins left to be mined. But what it does mean is that the network will spit out less coins per debt. And so starting sometime in mid to late April, probably in the next 10 or so days, we’re going to cut, the network is going to cut the supply of Bitcoin from 900 coins a day to 450. And that’s meaningful because you have a ton of people that are buying the Black Rock ETF buying Kathy Woods ETF, and there’s probably several 1000 coins of demand. But there’s only 450 coins being produced by the network per debt. And so that has a tendency to typically push the price up but but what happens it’s a market. And so what typically happens is the halving happens on the price goes down. So why that happened? Well, there’s a lot of people that were waiting for the halving, they decided that they made some money in Bitcoin, they’re not long term holders, they’re gonna get out of Bitcoin. And there’s a new wave of people that come into Bitcoin. And then there’s people like me never sell my bitcoin. And so I don’t care if it goes down, I’m gonna sit and hold it, and then it builds itself back up. And that’s happened over the last 14 years of Bitcoin. It is the best performing asset that we know about in the world. Okay, from the day of its inception.

Andrew Brill 44:27
Yep. And that’s evidenced by what Raoul Paul’s told you and that’s a that’s you know, it’s it’s, it’s all here in the sweet life of Bitcoin appendix. One of the appendix is in here is the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper so if you want to read it, the sweet life of Bitcoin the sweet life with Bitcoin sorry, and written by you, and Anthony, I appreciate your time and I hope that a lot of our viewers got a better taste of what bitcoin and cryptocurrency is all about how it’s used, and not to be sold. Free to have it and jump in, maybe make a couple bucks. That’s what it’s all about, right?

Anthony Scaramucci 45:04
Just telling people get off zero, put your life savings in it. Don’t think of that as a lottery ticket. It is volatile. You know, be be wary, but get off zero and join this revolution. And I always say to people, you buy a little bit of Bitcoin, you start focusing on the technical properties of it, and you’ll be excited that you did.

Andrew Brill 45:26
Anthony, thanks so much for joining me. I know you got another interview coming up shortly and I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Anthony Scaramucci 45:32
Good to be here, Andrew. Thank you.

Andrew Brill 45:33
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