Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…You’d have to go a long way away from here. Durability, I mean Bitcoin is way, way more durable than US dollars. We rotate dollars out of the system every once in a while because they just get too ratty. Your Bitcoins are not going to degrade on a hard drive or in cold storage somewhere. Basically, in everything except for broadly accepted, Bitcoin wins. Now, again, that thing we talked about earlier with the US dollar having this overwhelming unbelievable head start on the network effect, TBD if Bitcoin can actually—even though it's better in all these ways—fight that? An open question is does it need to, or can it exist as a complement alongside? There are three more features that Bitcoin has that the USD doesn't. Again, going back to Matt Huang here, it is digital, programmable—there’s actually four—decentralized and censorship-resistant, and universal. I think that's where you start to get into this daydreaming about finally a currency for the internet. Things like smart contracts, which you can do on a very limited basis with Bitcoin. That it's digital-first where you're not saying I'm transferring you some money but it's on credit. I’ll make good on it later. You're literally instantly or within 30 minutes moving money from one account to another. The decentralized and censorship-resistant, it’s very interesting, 5 or 10 years ago, I would not have been a person that's like that's super important in money. But I think everyone's confidence has been a little bit shaken by recent events. Maybe I do want to hedge. Maybe I do want some amount of hedge in case. I had to be clear, certainly, recent events in the US like the Capitol happening, but also recent events in China and all over the world. Maybe except New Zealand. I think New Zealand is on the rise, but it's hard to think of other governments where trust isn't going down around the world right now.…

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