Preston Pysh  01:40

All right, so let’s just dive right into this. I always like to start off with a person’s core, and what influenced them to become the person that they are today. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

01:52

Yeah, love to do that. You have to start with your parents, right? I definitely have very good parents and I wanted a bicycle when I was like three or four for my birthday. I asked my dad for it and my dad was like, “How are you going to buy it?” So we actually went out on family walks and collected cans that I’d feed to the golden goat and I collected enough money to buy my own bicycle. My mother always felt that it was extremely important for me to understand money, even from a very early age. She did whatever she could to kind of encourage and teach that between understanding kind of theory of money.

02:27

In this entrepreneurship with my father, I started selling otter pops to construction workers and then lemonade. My dad was actually doing an MBA at the time when I was like three or four. I’d sit on his lap while he’s reading this macroeconomics textbook, while he’s also working a full-time job. That kind of went on and in middle school, I started playing online games. Sure, the games are fun, but what was more fun is that I would sell the items in the game in order to get U.S. dollars. I was selling swords and shields in these virtual games and I also played Magic: The Gathering. I learned a lot of the skills that that game ends up teaching you in terms of probabilities, statistics, and bluffing, kind of like poker and all that stuff. I think I was 12 at the time.

03:15

My father had some of the different series licenses for securities and stuff. He wanted to teach me a lesson about investing, as opposed to just doing entrepreneurship. For the lesson, he’s teaching me about stocks where he would say, “What stocks should we buy?” I was like, “Oh, I think we should buy Marvel stock.” Then he’d ask, “Why should we buy Marvel stock?” I said that it was because everybody at school was reading those comic books. We didn’t end up buying any Marvel stock, but a year later, the Marvel stock had gone from like, $6 to $120. I mean, some huge amount, I kind of looked at that and with my 12-year-old brain, I realized that I had to figure out how to play that game.

03:15

When I tried to approach the game of trading stocks and stuff, that’s when I really delved into the macro picture. I was analyzing everything. I was like, “Oh, I want to own oil stocks,” so I bought a bunch of Canadian Oil Trust, because they paid monthly dividends and did very well with those. It wasn’t until I was in law school, and I took a particular course on American legal history. I needed to write like a 60-page paper and I decided to write it on the history of money and currency in American law for this paper. I was trying to research for it and I can’t find anything, and so I went to ask the professor who was an attorney and had a PhD in history.

03:16

That was way easier than taking soda cans in my backpack and selling to kids to make a little bit of money. Eventually, like Warren Buffett, I got a soda machine like he got a pinball machine. I sold over 100,000 sodas before I graduated high school. From that soda machine, I had an average profit margin of 33 cents a can. I then took that money, invested, and I started trading stocks.

04:57

I told him that I can’t find anything. I said, “I need to write this paper, it’s getting further into the semester. Can you help me with the research?” He tried to do some research, but he can’t find anything either. He said, “If you can’t find anything in the next week, you’re going to have to change your topic because you’re not going to have enough time.” Sure, enough within that next week, I don’t remember exactly, I was dinking around through the internet, and I found Pieces of Eight by Dr. Edwin Vieira. I had the library bring it in from L.A., and then I started reading through that. Holy cow, it just started putting all the pieces together and the philosophical and political theory behind sound money and all this stuff because it’s in the Constitution.

05:37

That’s where I really got grounded in understanding monetary science and monetary theory. I’d read through that and then it was just a very natural fit when I came across Bitcoin because in high school and college years, I dealt with Napster, BitTorrent, censorship, resistance, and the development of these protocols. That’s how I really came into Bitcoin because I actually wrote software and wrote different things that I needed to get done before I came to Bitcoin.

06:08

I came with this macroeconomic perspective, this monetary theory perspective understanding of software code from having written some on my own and then just being a digital native having grown up in the age of Napster, BitTorrent, and online games and just all this stuff. Bitcoin just became a very natural fit for me, when I came across it. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is going to solve so many of the problems that the world has, especially with Bitcoin now. Nobody’s going to get bailed out anymore, the days of that are done.”

Stig Brodersen  06:40

If you look at the media, it seems like the vast majority of the courage is about the price movement of Bitcoin, and it’s really conceptualized as just another tool of speculation. Bitcoin is so much more, so instead of thinking that it’s another asset to speculate in, how should we perceive Bitcoin?

07:00

Trust. If I’m going to encapsulate it in one word, we’re establishing trust in an entirely new way. I learned double entry bookkeeping, with my accounting degree. Bitcoin is the first practical implementation of triple entry bookkeeping. When we’re valuing derivatives, when we’re valuing different assets and liabilities on all of these financial statements, well guess what, you value the assets really high and the liabilities really low so that you get a better bonus. There’s discretion in that valuation of how that happens.

07:29

So like pension accounting, you want to talk about a complete mess. It’s how do you value the assets that are held in everybody’s pensions? We’re talking about hundreds of millions or even billions of people’s lifetimes being stored in certain assets. And guess what Bitcoin does? It brings trust because you got triple entry bookkeeping, you got immutability, you got censorship resistance. Money is only one application of this. It’s an Internet Protocol. So we’re talking about a set of rules that computers follow in order to come to a distributed consensus about what the state of something is.

08:03

Money is one application of that, but it filters all the way through because it’s going to filter through to establishing facts in terms of information theory, like what actually happened. In an age of deep fakes that can happen in an age of ‘Did somebody really say something?’ Well, you can put out a public key and you can sign a message with it, and you can anchor it into the blockchain, and now you know that somebody said that at a certain date in the past.

08:31

Why is that able to be proven? Well, because the economics and the game theory that go behind this protocol, we are able to look at the thermodynamics. How much electricity, energy and computer processing power goes into that proof of work that’s behind that. We are able to get competence levels of assessment in terms of being able to roll back that history or that mutability of the facts.

08:54

I mean, what’s the first thing that people who want to commit a fraud do? They bring out the shredders and they start feeding the Enron and the WorldCom papers into the shredders because they want to change what happened in the past. That’s how they tried to do the bailouts. And so Bitcoin is about bringing trust. What can you actually trust in the book The Great Credit Contraction? 500 years ago we trusted having a commodity money like gold or silver in our hand, and we moved to having fractional reserve and then eventually having fiat currency. This was a great credit expansion, but kind of like how you throw a baseball up in the air, the baseball is going to come back down to earth because of gravity. The pendulum always swings and now is swinging back.

09:35

So we’ve got different forms – we’ve got performance risks, we’ve got counterparty risk. All these forms are risks. Bitcoin allows us to just totally get rid of counterparty risk, the financial ability of the counterparty to perform fractional reserve. You don’t need any of that with Bitcoin because it’s an equity-based instrument. You don’t need a lender of last resort. You need *inaudible* of last resort. Performance risk, that’s proof of keys, that’s how we can figure out whether they’re going to actually keep the contract or not.

10:03

As we develop trust in society, and as we lower the barrier to entry or the cost in order to get trust, it increases our social scalability of a society. That means that we can trust people in much easier ways and then that enables our society to get more complex. Bitcoin at its core is about trust. From the extension of that, it feeds into everything, like how do we trust our interactions with other humans? What implications is this going to have in terms of governments, societies, geopolitics and geo strategy?

10:38

It’s not just the micro but it’s also the macro. It’s a technological innovation that happens once a species, this triple entry bookkeeping, with the implications it has in terms of money and the wealth transfer effect that results from that. Maybe I just don’t have much creativity, but I don’t really see how we could have a similar type of disruption happen to the human species. I mean, we’re going to be equity based going forward, like it’s no longer a debt based fractional reserve.

Preston Pysh  11:09

So Trace, this evening I was having a conversation with a person that never has owned Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency before in their lives and the topic of Bitcoin came up and they made this comment  to me, “I just don’t understand how it’s going to have more utility or beat out the dollar. In five years from now, why am I going to be using Bitcoin in a grocery store compared to the dollar? I find that really hard to believe.” I pose the same question to you. How would you respond to a person like this?

11:45

The first 10 years of Bitcoin we’ve largely only seen a small amount of the speculation network effect take root. Maybe it’ll take a few decades before we really get to these other deeper network effects. Five years out, store value is probably going to be a significant use case with Bitcoin. It’s already got a multi hundred-billion-dollar market cap. We’ve got central bankers talking about it with very odd body language, like they’re stressed out. We have regulators that are heavily involved in the space now. We have legislators in Wyoming, the work that Caitlin Long and I have been working on getting these 13 bills passed, and then other jurisdictions that are both in the US and internationally that are passing different laws.

12:32

All this stuff is enabling because we have a lot of financial repression that happens through draconian laws like money transmission laws, of money service business laws, and know your customer, and anti-money laundering. All these things *inaudible* money in an attempt to bring it more and more under the jurisdiction, kind of kicks the door down. We’ve had a nationalized, we’ve had a largely socialized monetary unit that’s contrary to the fundamental law of the land. The Federal Reserve note is unconstitutional. The Constitution, it uses the phrase dollar twice, once in the slave clause which was highly contentious.

13:10

The term dollar needs to have a definition which gotten the 1792 coin a jack which is 371.25 grains of fine silver, .9995 silver, and it’s the states that make property rights and remedies. No state shall make anything but gold or silver tender in payment of debts. One, having the federal government make anything legal tender, they’re not given that in Article One, Section Eight. They’re not given that power and it states make anything legal tender. They can only make gold or silver legal tender under Article One, Section 10. Clause One. Guess what, that’s unconstitutional.

13:44

How did it get that way? Executive Order 6102. Franklin Roosevelt had the federal government seize the gold. He attempted to pack the Supreme Court under the issue of economic substantive due process. Then we had the legislators outlaw ownership of gold and silver. They didn’t really legalize it until 1974. After 1974 in the case city versus Dover, it squarely framed the issue of what is $1 and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. So we have all three branches of government abdicate, shirking their responsibility to uphold the Constitution when it comes to monetary repression. What’s the average citizen supposed to do when it comes to claiming the right to protecting private property, and it does all of these things at a much lower cost than anything else that has been invented in human history.

14:37

You can now store $100 million and it can’t be confiscated, it can’t be seized, it can’t be impeded. You store $100 million in gold, and guess what, they can come and kill you and take your gold. It doesn’t work that way with Bitcoin. It’s just going to force the issue for society in so many different ways. Once you take away that power over money from the state and invest it with the individual, that begins to change tons of things, and it does that because it’s changing the economics of violence at a fundamental level. It’s enabling the individual to secure protection for their private property at a much lower cost. As a result, they don’t need to acquire protection services at the cost that they were paying to the nation states, because that’s one of the reasons that the individual hires nation states, supposedly.

15:25

This is the other side of the path, everybody just a slave. People are either going to have some money and determine their own financial destiny because they have private property and can perform economic calculation, or they’re going to be slaves to political leads. They’re going to starve to death eventually, because society won’t be able to perform economic calculation in order to determine how good should be deployed in society for productive uses.

15:51

Humanity is now getting forced to choose with Bitcoin. It’s going to be a very exciting future to figure out how this gets played out. Five years from now, I don’t think it’s going to be that big of an issue but think about it, 10 years ago, how big of a role did YouTube play in national elections? Not that big. Fifteen years ago, it didn’t play any role because it didn’t exist. Now YouTube is changing elections at a fundamental level. We’re talking about something that might even be more powerful than YouTube, we’re talking about money.

Stig Brodersen  16:24

So Trace, we know we have a lot of investors who listen to this show, who are not looking at Bitcoin as a way to speculate, but are looking at it as a way to diversify and to store value. This question is really for them. The last cycle that we saw that was back in 2017, when we really saw the Bitcoin price spike, and one could argue that we are now in another bear market from the low 3000s to more than 13,000 not too long ago. Where do you see us in the current Bitcoin cycle?

Trace Mayer  16:58

How I look at it is this could be a real doozy of one. They’ll blow your hair back because when you look at the log chart of Bitcoin, and I put out a tweet, we could be looking at $100 to $250,000 per Bitcoin. By the time this particular bull market comes to resolution, where are we currently at with it? You have the Mayer Multiple, I’d put out on several different interviews that I’ve done kind of the basic methodology but you put a name to it, it’s really not something I do myself, but it’s out there now, right?

17:31

We look at that Mayer Multiple and you’d mentioned $3,000 Bitcoin, well, when there was $3,000 Bitcoin there, it was like 0.5 on the Mayer Multiple. Now we’re at 2.4 on the Mayer Multiple, and the Mayer Multiple is you take the current price divided by the 200 day moving average, and that gives you a relative price of .5 or 2.4, and then you can look at standard deviations in terms of that relative price and that helps you understand. Is Bitcoin more expensive relative to its past history? Bitcoin’s a little bit expensive right now, whereas when it was .5, it was really cheap. I totally agree that equal opportunity moneymaker here, what are going to do? Like let’s make some money, that’s the first network effect of Bitcoin, and so you want to buy it when it’s a low Mayer Multiple because you have a greater probability of it going up.

18:24

You wanted to buy it when it was $3,000 a few months ago, and now it might be a good time to necessarily not buy it and maybe sell some of it. I actually use the Mayer Multiple a lot in how I decide to trade Bitcoin because I like to trade it. You can make more money doing that. You can make more Bitcoins, but I’m more about understanding the sound money aspect of this because I don’t want to live in 1956 Slovakia. I don’t want to live in Venezuela, where we don’t have protection or property rights and people starve to death. I want people to be happy, healthy, free, and have monitoring sovereignty. Those are core values to me that are more important than making money because this fight isn’t necessarily about making money. It’s about these fundamental human and civil rights. Money’s power. With power and with money, you can accomplish a lot of good in the world. Hopefully, we can accomplish a lot more good than the people who currently have that money in power.

Preston Pysh  19:22

So Trace, just to give the audience just a little bit more context. Let me talk a little bit more about the Mayer Multiple. So back in 2017, I remember reading an article where you were talking about one of the ways that you tried to understand the trading range of Bitcoin, whether it was a high price or low price or what was normal and at the time, we were in this really hot bull market and many people were suggesting that the price could go really incredibly high. Trace had pointed out various points in time in the past, where the price compared to the 200 day moving average had these multiples, so I decided to expand on this idea by taking more data points and incorporating every single day that Bitcoin traded as our data set opposed to just a few instances in time, and then plotted that out, figured out what was a normal multiple, what was an extreme multiple on the high and on the low side in this data distribution plot using statistics to figure out what that looked like.

20:25

What’s fascinating is, on the low side, the price of Bitcoin has only gone below .5, only eight days in the past decade. So eight times has it has gone below a .5 that price recently occurred. In fact, when it did, Trace tweeted about it and this was probably just six months ago that we hit this price and Trace tweeted “Hey, this is not normal. This is a very low price.” Of course, most people did nothing about it, and literally today in the sixth month kind of timeframe, it’s 400% higher than then when we sent out that tweet.

21:05

Now, what’s interesting is the price today is at a 2.4, which is very high relative to other points in time when you look across the whole spectrum of all the days that it’s traded. We’re recording this on the 27th of June 2019, just for context. What we’ve seen historically is whenever it comes up to the multiple, we’re seeing right now, is typically the price takes a break for 30 or 60 days before it keeps doing whatever it does. Now, there’s no way of knowing that what’s actually going to happen and whether that’s going to happen again, but that’s what the multiple is suggesting. So, the point of all of this, and the reason I explain this is the main reason I made the tool was to help people understand what those statistics look like so that if you’re buying it for the first time, and there’s a very high Mayer Multiple, like right now, you just need to buckle up and get ready for a wild ride.

22:00

There’s probably going to be some painful first 30, 60, 90 days, if you’re buying it at a high multiple, that’s just something people have to be prepared for. That’s what the math has taught us by viewing it through this lens. At the same time, if you’re buying it at a low multiple, you’re probably not going to have much of your temperament tested. If you own it for another 30, 60, or 90 days, because it doesn’t happen very often. So, we’re just trying to put the mathematics out there so that people can kind of look at and say, “Alright, this is normal, or this is very abnormal.” I’m in the fear of missing out phase and the multiple’s very high, and if you’re buying, just be prepared, that’s all. That’s all we’re trying to do.

22:00

So, Trace, I’m kind of curious. I’m sorry to take up so much time because I really want you to be talking and not myself, but this is something that we have kind of gone down a path together. So, I want to kind of hear your thoughts.

Trace Mayer  22:54

We’ve got the fundamental analysis, and I’ve gone over that a little bit with the sound money thesis, the store value, the seven network effects. But then we’ve got the kind of a technical analysis because you make money when you buy, you need to buy undervalued assets. Now one of the problems that a newbie would have is that they don’t have any Bitcoin at all, right? We’re talking about an uncorrelated asymmetric return sovereign equity based monetary unit that’s hard kept in supply, where we know exactly how many there are.

23:25

It’s not like gold or silver. It’s global, immutable, decentralized, and it’s a digital store of value. It’s a way to transfer value over a communications channel. It doesn’t really matter what the Mayer Multiple is. If you don’t have any of it at all, you’re totally naked on this huge wealth transfer that can happen. Now if you’ve actually got some, you might start figuring out your personal strategy when it comes to how much capital you want allocated to this. I like to put the statistics and the probabilities in my favor.

Preston Pysh  24:01

Trace, let me shift gears just a little bit. How do you think about the energy consumption of Bitcoin?

Trace Mayer  24:07

The energy markets, when you look at them, they’re highly regulated worldwide. In a lot of ways with how the proof of work and all of this works like you’re going to want to have some Bitcoin as a hedge against potential increases in the cost of energy. Energy could get pretty expensive because the opportunity cost would be binding Bitcoin with it instead. The other thing is, I think that we have just a ton of propaganda around energy.

24:35

Look at the disaster of the European economies because they’ve been “going green” and all this stuff. Bitcoin, in so many ways, uses the inefficient electricity, or at least it has been using it so far. It’s electricity that’s stranded in different areas. It’s largely renewable, like hydroelectric dams, things of that nature. As the mining gets more and more competitive in these strange energy cases get hooked into the Bitcoin blockchain, that’s when we’re going to start seeing the effect in the energy markets where the opportunity cost is mining Bitcoin, especially if the price like really runs.

25:12

One more thing, I definitely think that the hash rate follows price and not vice versa. It’s going to come online, whether people wanted to come online or not. What are you going to do? Pass a law that you can’t mine? It’s just going to go somewhere else where it can or it’s going to continue mining and it’s going to be using block streams, satellites, or whatever censorship resistant technology is out there to use.

Preston Pysh  25:34

So Trace, what are you most excited about in the coming year from a technology standpoint?

Trace Mayer  25:39

Well, hopefully Schnorr signatures will be on the horizon via software. I’m also very, very interested in MimbleWimble. I doubt that won’t get rolled out in Bitcoin. First, it’s already been rolled out in Grin and Beam. It’s any of this privacy and fungibility technology that I’m very interested in. In Bitcoin, we’ve had to make a tradeoff between limited and a mountainous and fungibility, I think that’s a good thing because we can continue lowering the cost in terms of time, money and privacy for this monetary sovereignty, that’s just going to continue vesting more and more power with the individual.

Preston Pysh  26:17

So Trace, I truly cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. Back in 2015, early 2015, I remember distinctly watching a video on Real Vision TV, and you were the person that they were interviewing about Bitcoin. I didn’t know almost anything about Bitcoin at that point in time and after your interview, I was so convinced that what you were talking about had so much credence and it gave me this incentive to go out and just try to learn as much as I possibly could about Bitcoin. Read as many books as I could get my hands on, watch more interviews that you had done, and I just learned so much about your opinions on why Bitcoin was important, and it just had a huge impact on me. It actually led me to buying Bitcoin back at that time when it was $200, $220 a coin and it’s just amazing to be here talking to you.

Trace Mayer  27:16

Thanks, so much Preston. It’s experiences like that that really helped continue giving me motivation for doing the work that I do. Another thing with Bitcoin, we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves, we have a tendency to judge our past selves based on our current self-knowledge or understanding. But keeping that in mind, the most important trade you’re going to make are with your future self. It’s gonna be this concept of time preference and Bitcoin hits you right in the nose with a frying pan when it comes to that. Things like that, that when you’ve talked about the impact it’s had on your life. The ones I really like is when I’m at a conference or something and it someone says, “I’ve been following you for years and, and I used to drink a bunch of alcohol and I used to smoke a bunch. Now I don’t do any of that because I want to buy and have more Bitcoin.”

28:02

Seeing people get rid of habits that are just not helpful, unhealthy or useful to them and converting that into better habits or being able to do something better and more useful to their future self. By extension, the people they have relationships with, whether it’s significant others or their children or what, or being able to take care of their parents or grandparents, these are things that I find very helpful because it’s not about running around and collecting a bunch of coins like Mario. No, seriously, money is only going to make you more of who you are. You really have to figure out what motivates you. Why do you do the things that you do?

28:42

Do you want to be happy or not? Because you’re going to master what you do. You could be a lawyer, you could be an accountant, like you’re going to master what you do. I think a lot of what we do is, we live life, but we don’t live it very intentionally in a way that we become masters at the art of living. Having happiness and kind of joy in our own lives and then also in our relationships with other people. That’s really what being down here is about. I mean, if you’re just running around like collecting coins, like Mario and some video game, how long are you going to do that? You will still be thinking about that when you’re 89? No, you might be sorely disappointed.

29:21

So this concept of time preference, what really matters in this life and why are we doing the things that we’re doing? If you believe that you’re going to continue to exist after you pass on, like Dr. Eben Alexander has written significantly about the neuroscientists. Time preference is a very powerful thing in looking at all of this and looking at our motivations for why we’re doing what we do. Hearing that from you and from a lot of other people that I run into at conferences and stuff. It helps me kind of feel warm and fuzzy about some of the work I’ve been doing, which is really what all of us want at the end of the day, isn’t it? We want to feel happy and we want to feel like we’re being a part of influence and useful and helpful to other people.

Stig Brodersen  30:03

I couldn’t agree more. It’s not about ourselves, but how much value we can bring to other people. Trace, thank you so much for coming on our show. Where can the audience learn more about you?

Trace Mayer  30:13

Twitter, @TraceMayer, and then from there, you can find my Bitcoin knowledge podcasts and a lot of my other work.

Stig Brodersen  30:20

Alright guys, that was all the Preston I had for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We’ll see each other again next week.

Outro 30:28

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