How To See Crypto Ponzi‑Scheme n' Bitcoin' Green w/ Alexander Svetsky | ROI Podcast™ ep. 496

"Magnifying glass examining colorful crypto coins labelled ‘Ponzi,’ one golden Bitcoin standing out as genuine, cautionary warning icons..."

ROI Podcast® episode 496! In this episode, entrepreneur and writer Alexander Svetsky shares stories from his wild ride through the crypto world. He talks about co‑founding one of the first Bitcoin‑only savings/exchange platforms and why dealing with regulators made him say “never again.” Alexander also explains why he’s building Satlantis, a Bitcoin‑powered ticketing app, and how his writing on economics and philosophy has influenced his entrepreneurial journey.

We dive deep into Bitcoin’s fundamentals—what makes it different from “shitcoins,” why sound money matters, and how bad incentives distort economic behavior. Alexander breaks down how Bitcoin is backed by energy and how mining can even stabilize the power grid by flexibly using surplus renewable energy - cryptoforinnovation.org -  and providing load‑balancing services - cryptoforinnovation.org -  You’ll hear why he believes decentralization beats trust in institutions and what industries could look like in a Bitcoin‑standard world.

If you’re curious about energy debates, Ponzi‑scheme cryptos, or the myth of Satoshi Nakamoto, this episode delivers fresh insights. We also get personal—Alexander reflects on mistakes, shares advice for his 13‑year‑old self, and discusses being a new dad.

Hit like, subscribe and ring the bell if you enjoy these deep dives into business, tech and philosophy. Share your thoughts and questions in the comments. Listen to ROI Podcast® on your favorite podcast platform for the full experience!

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Eric Readinger  0:03  
All right, Alexander, can just go ahead and get into it. Law is running late, so we're just going to do the GET TO KNOW YOU part here. Go ahead, tell us your name, what you're about, and any sort of links you want us to be directed to.

Alexander Svetsky  0:18  
No worries, man. So name is Alexander svetsky. I'm funny enough more people know me for my writing online than than they do for my business stuff, but I've been more of an entrepreneur all my life. Made every mistake in the book, as I'm sure every single entrepreneur realizes, the older they get and they realize they were dumber than what they thought at the time. So that's that's been like the content learning for me, but these days, I'm building a really cool events app. It's kind of like Luma or Eventbrite, but just with, like, Bitcoin payments and some other features, which are really cool, and if people want to know anything about me or what I'm doing, the app is called satlantis. So like Atlantis with an s.io so they can check that out. And if they look up svetsky writes on Twitter, so S, V, T, S, K, I, writes like writing on Twitter, they can find me there. But, you know, I'm not even on fucking social media much anymore. These days. I'm sick and tired of all that crap. I get too triggered, and then I go on there and start, like, saying a bunch of shit. And I'm like, okay, maybe I shouldn't have said

Eric Readinger  1:25  
that. Yeah, gotta keep it inside, you know, and don't engage so easy. Said, No, satlantis is the the ticketing app you're talking about. That's the way that you're working on now, yes, I saw something about a cryptocurrency exchange that you started, and I guess that's how you got, you know, going in this business. What? What's that about? That seems like a big deal, like a start your own exchange. It's like one thing to make a shit coin, whatever, but your own exchange, that's, that's pretty badass.

Alexander Svetsky  1:59  
Yeah, man, we were the, we were the first Bitcoin only exchange slash savings app in the world. Actually, we were, we didn't fuck around with any shit coins. We didn't do any of that stuff. We were just purely, I had been involved in a little bit of FinTech stuff earlier. So we figured out a way to link people's bank account to their arm to the app, and they could just basically set automated rules to accumulate Bitcoin on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, right? So kind of like dollar cost averaging. So I guess you know we were, we were classified as an exchange. And yes, you could go from dollars to Bitcoin and back. So there was an exchange functionality. But really, like the the app was a savings app. That's kind of how we how we thought about it. And, yeah, man, we were the, you know, I dealt with the fucking regulators and the banks and the this and the that and, like, it was a, it was a, it was a stressful business. I got out of that at the end of 2021, because I was done, done with the regulators, done with, like, I ended up I was building a compliance business, not a technology company anymore, like, after about four and a half years, and I was like, fuck this shit. I didn't sign up for this. So I I stepped down as CEO, somebody else took over, and then I kind of sold my shares and

Eric Readinger  3:10  
moved on. So you were doing that. It was that in Australia, you were doing that. Yep. So they're just as bad down there as they are up here.

Alexander Svetsky  3:17  
Yeah. And they've got even more. I mean, I would say the capacity for the US to to, like, fuck someone over, for lack of a better term, is better, like, you know, yeah, you're gonna have the best of that shit. Yeah, they'll find you halfway around the world, on a fucking island somewhere. Then, you know, they'll get you. The Aussies don't have that same sort of strength, but they're kind of like middle managers, you know. I mean, you know that, like, that guy is just like, right here and just like, right yeah, you want me sniffing in your ear and shit like that, and then follow the leader Exactly. So, so they're like that. So, you know, I was sort of done with the bureaucrats, and figured do something else with my life.

Eric Readinger  4:04  
So you talk about writing online, kind of writing are you talking about? Is it all crypto related?

Alexander Svetsky  4:10  
It was more this sounds cringey, but you know, philosophy or like history and economics, kind of like I found my own voice, kind of blending all of these, like deeper concepts about, hey, you know, the world is fucked up. We're surrounded by idiots. And how can we build a better world? You know, I always looked at Bitcoin as kind of like a important instrument in that, yeah, because you have this, yeah, it's, um, you have sound money. And, you know, the more you fuck around with the money, the more you fuck around with people's time preference. And the time preference is related to behavior. You know, it's like, do you just consume and think about now without thinking about the future, or do you think about the future and value that and therefore, you know, delay gratification, all that sort of stuff, and actually use your brain. So when you screw around with the money. E you distort people's time preference. You make them more present oriented instead of future oriented, and as a result, you kind of create poor behavior, and then that kind of has knock on effects throughout society. So the idea here is that, you know, with sound money that people can't print and can't fuck around with, you can hopefully nudge people in a better direction, and their behavior improves. So I kind of talked about all of that stuff,

Eric Readinger  5:23  
Wow, sounds, I mean, it sounds like you're going just beyond philosophy, is that psychology and the whole deal? Because, I mean, you're going deeply indeed. I mean, you're right though, like a decentralized money system is what's got to happen, in my opinion, just because I get into this, has been a while since we argued about Bitcoin law and I but he's like, I'm not buying. It's not backed by anything. I'm like, what is that piece of paper in your hand backed by he thought it was still backed by gold. For one thing, argued about that. Yes, I said he's backed by the US government, okay, which has its own staying power, sure. But like, what does that mean? Like, they literally just print whatever they want. Like, it's, you know, whereas Bitcoin, it's infinitely divisible, you know, you can always add a decimal point, add a decimal point so, like, your value is never really going to go down. It's only going to go up. I've got that, right?

Alexander Svetsky  6:22  
Yeah, yeah, it's infinitely divisible, but it's the total supply is capped. And, you know, a good sort of response to the is it capped? Sorry, is it rose by energy, right? So, you know, the US government can channel more energy in a military context than any other institution on Earth, which is why they are superior. You know, gold is even backed by energy. It's like, How much energy does it require to extract the gold, to score the goal, to store the gold, to do all the sort of shit necessary there. Bitcoin is also fundamentally backed by energy, but it's far more efficient. The distance between the energy consumption and the the guarantee of the money is very short. So with Bitcoin, you are mining, and that mining process translates into the security of the network directly, whereas the US government, or gold, you expend all this energy on all of this other fluff in order to create the the guarantee that their promise for the money is going to be accurate, right? So that's so with the US government, it's more of a promise. With gold, it's more of a process. So Bitcoin will be able to scale in energetic load orders of magnitude greater than the US and everything like that. So ultimately, you know, yes, right now, Bitcoin is still nascent. It is still young, but we're talking about something that is designed to like last for 1000 years. You know, we're 15 years into the game. So you know, 50 years from now, bitcoins energy expenditure for securing the network will be greater than the US government's military might and all this sort of shit like nobody's gonna be able to touch it, right? So what you're doing by taking a bet on Bitcoin today is you're taking a bet on mathematics and cryptography being more a better guarantee than the promise of some fucking Federal Reserve retard, you know, promising interest rates. I

Eric Readinger  8:27  
mean, I've never really heard it explained that way. That's cool, though, like, in terms of energy, because when people hear Bitcoin, what do they always hear, Oh, Bitcoin farm sucking up all our power. And I know it's not exactly the same thing, but like they're talking about electrical energy, and it's almost like this designed flaw that people want to talk about that it's like, Well, is it really because we get a feature, it's not a bug? Yeah, exactly when you put it that way, it's like, oh, well, yeah, they are spending a lot more money on making, you know, make sure the money is real money. But, yeah, that's when, when you, when you started the exchange. Did you keep it to just Bitcoin, or did you it was just Bitcoin straight up? Because, you know, even on, like, like, Venmo has, you know, you can buy crypto on there, and it's like, they'll have a couple, you know, here and there. And I'm just curious, like, what your take on, you know, just the various because there's 1000s of different coins to buy. What? How do you look at that?

Alexander Svetsky  9:38  
Yeah, it's basically, there's two categories of money. There's Bitcoin or this shit coin. There's like nothing else. And in shit coin land, there's everything from every single crypto, including non crypto, stuff like the US dollar, the Aussie dollar, the euro. They're all shit coins. Everything is a shit coin because everything is is basically a promise. Yes, by an institution, a group or an organization, Bitcoin is not a promise by an institution or an organization or something. Bitcoin is a digital constitution. So you know that you're not expecting some group or some organization to tell you, Oh, this is how much money we have. This is the money supply, and this is the inflation supply, or any that sort of stuff. No, Bitcoin is like a programmatic set in stone digital constitution that is in consensus, and you can get out of consensus if you want. So I can go today, and I can, you know, Bitcoin is a program. I can run the Bitcoin program on my computer, and I can change the rules. I can go, Yeah, fuck it. I don't want 21 million Bitcoin. I want 42 million. I can do that, but I knock myself out of the network because I'm no longer in sync with the rules. I'm no longer in sync with the Constitution, so now I'm on my own network by myself, with any other idiot who chose to jump with me and have 42 million coins instead of 21 right? So Bitcoin is really unique like this. It uses social consensus to ensure that the rules stay the same. And in order to change anything on Bitcoin, you have to convince everybody else to change as well. And, you know, this is sort of, this is one of the big insights that Satoshi created, was he used the fact that human beings can't fucking agree on anything as the mechanism for security on Bitcoin, which means, like, you know, try and get 10 people to go to the fucking to figure out where they're gonna eat, right for dinner, right? Yeah, never gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. So try and get there's probably at least, you know, 100,000 or 500,000 somewhere in that range, nodes that are basically running the Bitcoin script running the Bitcoin program, and they're in sync every 10 minutes. Every time a block is done, they're in sync. They catch and they sync. Try getting all of those people to change the fucking rules of anything right? Not gonna happen. The cat is out of the bag. So that is Bitcoin security model, everything else, every shit coin, every crypto, every fiat currency, everything, everything. The rules are changed by a small committee of two people, five people, 10 people, whatever, and they can vote they can change the rules. That is the difference between Bitcoin and everything else. So when you understand that, you realize that Bitcoin is like the one sort of money that cannot be manipulated or changed or anything, which means everybody, ultimately is going to find their way to it. So if you find your way there early, you're just ahead of the game when they're

Eric Readinger  12:27  
making these shit coins. Are they doing it off the sort of, like, infrastructure backbone of Bitcoin, and then are they having to do their own thing each time, and, like, write their own script, whatever? Okay, there's two ways

Alexander Svetsky  12:40  
you can. You can copy the Bitcoin code and you can create what's called create what's called a fork by changing the code. So that's, that's a so that's like Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin gold, Bitcoin, this, Bitcoin that, right? Or you can create your own blockchain and then you can issue your own token. That's more like Ethereum Solana and all these other points, right? So the similarity between the ethereums and the Solanas is that they use a similar sort of technological substrate to Bitcoin. So they call it the blockchain, but it's their own proprietary shit that they launched. So they're closer. In fact, Ethereum is closer to the Federal Reserve. All you've done is replace the bankers with some nerds. So, you know, so the so the nerds just issue their own money, and they're like, Oh yeah, trust us, we're not going to change the monetary policy. And they've changed the monetary policy like,

Eric Readinger  13:27  
20 times already. I mean, does it ever frustrate you? How much of life is a pyramid scheme? How many things are just like a freaking Ponzi scheme, whatever you want to call it? I mean,

Alexander Svetsky  13:36  
totally, totally like, everything's become a Ponzi scheme. The problem is, though, when the money is a fucking scam, everything becomes a Ponzi, right? Yeah, and that's the big that's the big problem bitcoin is trying to solve, right? Is that you fix the money and you get a really nice knock on effect, because everything else starts to demonetize. But because the money is broken, we've monetized everything else. So we treat real estate like a Ponzi scheme, because we don't want to store money. So what do we do? We buy fucking how? Fucking houses as investments, right? We do the same with gold, with stocks, with everything, because anything to get the hell out of the dollar, or to get the hell out of the money, because the money is devaluing. But if you have money that doesn't devalue over time, then all of this other shit goes away, because then you don't need to speculate, you don't need to invest like a retard. You don't need to fucking buy it, flip houses and all this sort of shit. Like you start to have a hurdle rate on investment, which is the natural appreciation of Bitcoin as a savings instrument, because savings is supposed to increase over time, like the purchasing power of your savings is supposed to go up, not fucking down. But we live in an upside down world, so, you know, everything else is distorted down that down the track, yeah.

Eric Readinger  14:45  
So do you have, you sort of projected into the future, any sort of consequences to, like, any particular industries or anything like, say, Bitcoin. Coin becomes the new standard. Do you see any, I guess, just industries in general, like so what would be a huge consequence of that that maybe I wouldn't think of

Alexander Svetsky  15:13  
good question. Here's one that nobody realizes energy, the entire fucking energy grid, the energy infrastructure transforms. So let me, let me give you an example. So one of the biggest problems on the on the energy side of things, is load balancing, load management and distribution. There's always problems with that, even in the, you know, top countries like America and Australia, like energy goes to fucking waste, especially like, there's a lot of stuff going on in Texas now with like methane flaring from, you know, gas and everything that they're getting out, you could take Bitcoin and you can put a Bitcoin mine next to a energy grid provider, like coal station, methane flaring and all this sort of stuff. And when you have excess capacity, you can channel that into Bitcoin, and you can transform that excess capacity into money so that you can load balance and therefore use those extra credits to better to give more competitive energy pricing, whatever you can start to transform the entire grid, because now you've merged energy and Money, which are the two fundamental layers of a civilization. You can't have a civilization of any kind without an energy grid or a monetary network. So Bitcoin kind of fuses into the energy grid, and it allows you to better distribute energy. You can also seed energy into places where you don't have a current grid. You can go and put a fucking mining plant in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Africa, with solar panels, for example. And then around that miner, you can start to then build a factory where the extra power can go into the factory, and then you can start growing out from there. And you can literally seed energy with money into new places where it didn't didn't exist before. And you can start to interconnect the entire fucking energy infrastructure of the world, and then ultimately what you end up getting is energy gets priced in what, in Bitcoin, not in fucking dollars. So then you have this beautiful symbiosis. So that is going to transform the entire

Eric Readinger  17:15  
world. Whoa, that's crazy to think about. I never even realized that was a possibility. I mean, our power plants, I guess they would, they're that often. They're just, how much energy are they setting on that? I mean, that's crazy, because, you know, it's happening already. There's

Alexander Svetsky  17:34  
Andrew, and he runs a company called Satoshi energy, and that's what he does. He powers with the he partners with the power companies, and he helps them build infrastructure to add load balancing equipment in the form of mining into their thing. I've got another friend. He has a he has a kind of, like a sauna spa with, like, magnesium pools and all this sort of shit for their heating. They use Bitcoin miners to produce the heat. The thing, you know, so there's all this, like, interesting stuff,

Eric Readinger  18:03  
places that are cold, in general. I mean, you know, like, that's, that's so cool. I mean, where's the money going if, let's say, the energy, you know, you have the the Bitcoin mining operation, right next to a power plant. Who gets that, that Bitcoin that is

Alexander Svetsky  18:21  
mined the power plant. So then they could use it for their top line, for example, so they can add to their top line, or they can use it to decrease the cost on during high peak times, so they can turn off the miner. And then they can use the excess power when it's needed for customers. But instead of slapping them with peak prices, they have a buffer, because they previously generated some money out of Bitcoin. So it'll create, like, more competition in the energy marketplace

Eric Readinger  18:49  
as well. So why would any power company have what? What objections would they have to that? Because, I mean, it's literally a license to print money.

Alexander Svetsky  18:57  
Yeah, it is. It's mainly a knowledge thing, man. So, you know, Riot Bitcoin, which is one of the big miners out of based out of Texas, they've converted shitloads of they've put all of their mining centers next to power plants and stuff like that. So all of this stuff is happening. All of this transformation is happening. So, you know, the early objections are, oh, well, we don't know what Bitcoin is. We don't trust it. It's too volatile, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of shit. But, you know, as each domino falls, you kind of get this kind of change in consciousness, same as, like, when I was talking about Bitcoin 10 years ago, to people, they're like, What the fuck are you talking about? You know, now, like, it's, you know, that sort of shift is gradual, and the objections kind of float away, and then it's like, okay, well, you know, it's not a scam anymore. So what is it? Well, now it's volatile. It's like, yeah, okay, fine. You know, in the next five years, that's gonna not be an objection anymore, and on we go.

Eric Readinger  19:50  
So do you stay up on energy trends because of all of this? Is it something that you pay attention to? Because, I mean, you. I never thought of it in these terms, but it seems energy keeps popping up in the conversation. I mean, is it something that you pay attention to? Are you looking for? Zero Point Energy? Are you, you know, trying to figure out what's next there too.

Alexander Svetsky  20:12  
I I was down that rabbit hole about two years ago. So I used to own a publication called the Bitcoin times, which was like a premium sort of collectible publication, where I invited the best thinkers around the world to do a long form essay, and then I'd compile them all into this beautiful, little collectible item. I did that a couple years ago, and we did actually an energy edition, and I had some writers from all around the world produce a piece for it, and, and I had one really interesting guy called Gideon Powell, who was, he's, he's, his dad was like a wildcatter in Texas, and, you know, he's got this company called Choya energy, which is, you know, they're, they're oil and gas company, and they're super into Bitcoin and everything they build from the oil and gas side, comes with the mining infrastructure associated to it and all this sort of stuff. So back then, I was super interested, you know, we had an article in there about, like, what do you call it? The the nuclear mini reactors that are modular. And, you know, that's another really interesting thing, is these guys that are building small modular reactors. That's what it's called, SMRs. They're combining the container with the nuclear reactor on one side and the Bitcoin mining kit on the other side, so it like comes as a package. So, you know, they can, and they can drop that into anywhere, and it just generates power, and whatever power is not being used by the community or by the industry or whatever, just goes into the miners and it offsets the cost. So, like, there's this beautiful symbiosis. So I used to be really down that rabbit hole. These days, I'm busy building the app and just had a first baby and all that sort of stuff. So not as much anymore. But dude, it's super fucking interesting, man.

Eric Readinger  22:01  
Man, I hope that comes to fruition. The conspiracy side of me. If, let's say there was a bad actor in the government that wanted to to destroy Bitcoin, or at least put a heart in on it, how would that go down? And law has just walked in the building,

Alexander Svetsky  22:21  
right? What's up, buddy? Yeah, right. I

Eric Readinger  22:25  
was asked about how somebody, a bad actor, could destroy Bitcoin. You're caught. I'm like a bad actor, like anybody, like a government entity or something like Nicholas Cage. Yeah?

Law Smith  22:41  
God's fire. Why pick on Tara reap? She's not really good actress. I could I

Alexander Svetsky  22:46  
don't even know who that is, so I'm just gonna assume she's a bad actress.

Law Smith  22:50  
You see her boobs in The Big Lebowski and she was an American Pie man.

Eric Readinger  22:55  
Way to derail this conversation, this is what I do best. I just learned so much as I Bitcoin and just boobs.

Law Smith  23:04  
All right, we're talking groups.

Eric Readinger  23:06  
I want to know, I want to know how you could, in theory, bring down the blockchain.

Alexander Svetsky  23:13  
It's, um, I think what I said earlier, the cat is out of the bag. I think it's kind of too late. You know, the the governments have tried multiple times. You know, outright fans never work. You know, the, you know, the nature of Bitcoin is that, you know there's, there's no, there's no individual or no group of individuals that matter enough to influence, to change anything. You know, it's like, Who do you go after the miners? Well, you know, the miners aren't gonna, like, right? It doesn't matter how much mining power you have. Like, what matters is the collection of nodes. So how do you go after all the nodes when all the node operators are anonymous and, you know, there's an incentive for them to hold on to it. So, you know, really, I think the only way for it to sort of to to be impacted, would be fucked

Law Smith  24:05  
his brain up in you gotta think of these. Yeah, I want to make I can see anybody stressed from a question as a guest, he's thinking, I know,

Alexander Svetsky  24:14  
here's the one way. Yeah, I've got it. Here's the one way, if the federal government and the Federal Reserve become so pristine and pure that they stop printing money, they tell us the total supply of money, they stop fucking taxation and theft and all the bullshit shenanigans that they're doing, and they all of a sudden become somehow fucking holy men and make the need for Bitcoin disappear. That's the only fucking way,

Eric Readinger  24:39  
and right into bitcoin is probably what they would do pretty

Alexander Svetsky  24:43  
much exactly now, in the absence of that, and, you know, I would be very willing, but that that's never gonna fucking happen, right? Exactly? Um, there's nothing that stops

Eric Readinger  24:52  
so there's not any sort of money manipulate, like they couldn't go in and buy up a bunch of it and like, because I guess that it just kind of reinforces it. In the opposite direction. So,

Alexander Svetsky  25:02  
yeah, the things like a fucking virus, this is what people don't get. It's like, it's a virus, and it's kind of, first it's like parasitic, because it comes in and sucks out of the system. Then it becomes symbiotic, because as enemies Buy Bitcoin, they become sort of sucked into it, right? So, and then after it becomes symbiotic over, you know, 1020, years, then it fucking topples the exit the previous system, and it becomes the standard. So, you know, it's kind of, we're in the symbiosis stage, like the parasite stage is gone. That was, like, the stage one now. It's like, it's in the institutions,

Eric Readinger  25:37  
yeah, coming in, going, it's like,

Law Smith  25:41  
yeah, I don't know. I'm coming in hot. Yeah, I know. I apologize for being late. I had someone potential client that's like, Hey, I got a couple of questions. I was like, let me pull over real quick. Here's my thing. Do we talk about the origins of Bitcoin and the Miss, the mystique around it, and this tall tale that I don't think exists, the more I think about it, what Satoshi, yeah, you know, you could go back in episodes, and I was like, I kind of liked the lore of it, but the more I've thought about it and sparingly here and there over the years, the more I don't think it's a real I don't think it's a real story.

Eric Readinger  26:20  
Well, no person. Well, I mean, what do you what do you mean the story that this guy invented it, and he nobody can

Speaker 1  26:26  
find him, yeah, like that in, like, a mathematical equation of like that no one can figure out. Or, like, I don't know that decentralized it, Bitcoin is definitely real. And, no, it's real. Don't get me wrong. I just think it's like the Bible, a little bit like Genesis, if you take Genesis at its

Eric Readinger  26:44  
word. Alex landers here, I'm glad he's here to

Law Smith  26:47  
explain what he was agreeing with me, I had,

Alexander Svetsky  26:49  
I was good, no, it's actually, it's actually kind of like that, you know, if you fast forward 100 200 years, it's going to be like a myth, kind of like, you know, the sort of the Genesis story, in the sense, I mean, we call the first block in Bitcoin, the Genesis block, right? Because that is where it emerged from. That's right. You know, there was. So the one thing he said that was incorrect was the sort of equation, or something like, it has no equation. And

Eric Readinger  27:11  
jump in here, and I'm

Law Smith  27:12  
speaking for the guy at the bar that talks about this. Yes, is how it's presented to me, a lot of the tires. I know that's not, I'll

Alexander Svetsky  27:18  
disentangle that for you. So basically, it wasn't an equation that was solved. It was it was a problem of coordination that was solved. So there's this concept called the Byzantine generals problem, which is, how do you get a bunch of people who to coordinate so the Byzantine generals to coordinate to attack the castle at the same time, if, if you have to send messages to each other, but the messenger could send an alternate, like message. So like, the messenger could be a bad egg, right? Game, how do you get them all? Sorry, a

Law Smith  27:50  
Game of Thrones. Kind of game

Alexander Svetsky  27:51  
theory, kind of Game of Thrones. So yeah, picture that. So you've got a castle and you've got a bunch of generals. The only way they can take the castle is if they all attack at once, but they can't communicate directly with each other. They have to communicate through some sort communicate through some sort of medium, some sort of messenger, and that messenger, if they are an enemy, unknown enemy, they tell one of the people not to attack, and then you all fail, right? So that was always like in decentralized systems. That was always a problem is like, how do you get people who can't communicate directly, who don't or who do not know each other to agree on something, to come to consensus on a regular basis. That's the problem that Satoshi solved. And the solution to that problem was a mixture of things. It was using cryptography. It was using an incentive mechanism, which is, you know, effectively the Bitcoin currency. It was the time it was launched. It was the fact that it was laughed at in the beginning. So all of these things happened in the real world that came to actually make Bitcoin work. So a lot of it was, like, luck. A lot of it was timing. A lot of it was, you know, technical infrastructure. A lot of it was all of this stuff. Could it have, could it have been done better, potentially, technically speaking. But the what makes Bitcoin special is that you actually can't go back in time and plant the seed again so that the same events happen one after the other. Like there was no way for Satoshi, for example, to predict that Silk Road was going to happen, right? Silk Road was the drug website. If you remember that like Silk Road,

Law Smith  29:22  
actually the first one. You could order an assassin if you wanted,

Speaker 2  29:26  
yeah, whatever you want it. But the whole point I got went to prison was the

Alexander Svetsky  29:31  
first, it was the first real use case for Bitcoin, yeah, there was no way to predict that. So that happened, and then that sort of created in the minds of the early adopters that holy shit, Silk Road was taken down, but Bitcoin wasn't touched. It couldn't be touched. So then it created more trust, more people were willing to mine, more people willing to buy, more people willing to build wallet infrastructure, all this sort of shit. So Bitcoin is effectively decentralized through its usage and through the way it's. Bred into civilization. That's the part you can't replicate because that you can't, like, the only way to replicate is to go back in time and do it again. And we don't have fucking time machines yet, so, like that. That's what

Law Smith  30:10  
you said that very confidently. I

Speaker 2  30:13  
mean, who knows? Eventually, here's some more law. Don't get me started. People started coin

Alexander Svetsky  30:17  
was kind of invented in the future and dropped into the past. So that's a, you know, that's,

Eric Readinger  30:22  
oh man, I might need to have you back

Law Smith  30:24  
to talk about just that. Wait, wait, I missed that. What is it said

Eric Readinger  30:27  
that there's some people that think Bitcoin was created in the future and then dropped in the past.

Law Smith  30:32  
Oh shit, like a tenant, yep, sure. That's

Unknown Speaker  30:37  
a whole. That's a whole. That's what that

Law Smith  30:38  
movie is about. Figured that out. I was like, why? What's the purpose of this movie? It's all about Bitcoin. You know, he does the thing with his hands, point am symbol, and then you got cutie patootie and a beard at the end there. That's the kick ass guy. That really handsome dude. Yeah, that's what I said. What's up? You're looking good today. I've got a question about Solana, do you know anything about that? It's a shit coin. We already talked about it. Well, friend of the program, former guest, Vadim Dimitri.

Off, nope. David. Off, David off, yes. Sorry, I'm on fire. He probably doesn't listen. He's he's the only person I know that went from St Petersburg, Russia to St Petersburg, Florida. He got me on one of these fitness apps early on, and he told me, if you do it with your Apple, watch, it'll track your steps, and you get Solana coin, or soul coin or whatever, depending on how much you do. And I go, great, and I forgot to set it up, and he did it, if he got it. This is like early, early, early on in the app, and I missed out on about three grand, I think, according to him, If I took it, if I took that coin and sat on it for a week and sold it off or whatever.

What is there anything kind of like that in incentivized programs? This is a roundabout question. It wasn't really about the coin at all. If you know of other cryptos that are setting up non financial incentives to gain it, if there's anything like that, you know,

Alexander Svetsky  32:24  
of I mean, the question

Law Smith  32:26  
is, like, real low looting on you? Yeah.

Alexander Svetsky  32:29  
I mean, who's, who's paying the incentives, and for what reason? Probably the app, I guess did, I don't know. I didn't really look into what. Why does it benefit the app? So, like, whenever, whenever you're getting money from, like, stupid shit, like walking around like, you, you know, you sort of got asked the questions like, okay, who's benefiting from this? What is the business model, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, so it's like all the shit coins are just like, literally spending money to buy users to prove that their network is real, so that they can continue the Ponzi scheme, so they can create more coins and dump more tokens on idiots, basically. So like, you know, all of these things are like weird machinations of, like modern society, which is all fucked up thanks to money printing, which distorts everything else economically. So, you know, you end up with all of this sort of weird stuff that doesn't make any fucking sense.

Law Smith  33:18  
We've got, we got about a minute left. I hate to cut you off. What was what did you ask him? The or question we asked everybody? No, good job. Do it. What advice would you give your 13 year old self? 13? Oh, shit. And you're saying my honey to a coin is not very good.

Alexander Svetsky  33:35  
No, no study about gold and silver a little bit earlier so that you can buy bitcoin earlier. That's literally the only fucking advice. That's it. Because, yeah, I got onto the gold and silver train a little bit late, kind of 2011 2012 had I done that a little bit earlier? I think I would have understood Bitcoin five years earlier, and that would have been a bit different. But here we are. Hey,

Law Smith  33:55  
we're all free market here, brother, I'll appreciate you coming on. Sorry, I was late, egregiously late.

Eric Readinger  34:02  
Yeah, I'm gonna actually make you listen to this one. I'm gonna happen a lot. This is the

Law Smith  34:05  
first time I'll listen to our podcast for the first time. Good. This is 496

Unknown Speaker  34:11  
episode, is it? Yeah? Okay.

Law Smith  34:14  
See you, buddy. Thanks. Jen.