Name: Joe Rogan Experience #844 - Andreas Antonopoulos
Uploaded: 2016-09-08T01:25:40.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #844 - Andreas Antonopoulos' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #844 - Andreas Antonopoulos' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #844 - Andreas Antonopoulos

all you creeps that are controlling money all throughout the world your time is
slowly closing
in am i right yep andreas antonopoulos author uh published author of the
internet of money
uh you've been on the show many times before but you've never been on the show
two days after a book fresh off the presses tell the story about how this book
got delivered to you
today because it's kind of hilarious yeah so nobody knew about this this is my
announcement
this is my second book first book was mastering bitcoin was for techies uh the
internet of money
is for everybody else and it's a collection of my talks and i was having the
first copy delivered to
my hotel this morning in order to bring it to the show and give it to you and
uh it was a day late
it was supposed to be delivered yesterday and i'm waiting and i'm i'm
refreshing the tracking number
site and then you said you know we can push it back by half hour because you're
running a bit late and
and in that half hour the book got delivered it literally was printed september
5th this is the
first copy i've touched and it's yours oh boy i've got it folks
issue 0001 now why do they do that just one why don't they just make it one why
does everybody have to do a one
well i'm not printing 10 000 issues so well they never go it's never like 000
0001
do they ever do that a pair of shoes once recently with that it was like one
out of
why are you in one of my ears only what the hell's going on there
well i can't have you in my left ear it's like you're like the voice of good or
the voice of bad
oh yeah yeah i got it too so it's on your end yeah that's too weird we can't
have that
try it again check check nope you weirdo you're coming in my left ear only
probably through the rest of america too right yeah they can't have that people
are at the gym
going what the jamie's in my left ear so this is a collection of all your talks
what has changed
in the world of bitcoin since the last time we spoke we've spoken we we hung
out in vegas which
was great i had a great time with you and um but what what has changed in the
world of bitcoin
since the last time well it's been uh about a year and a half almost and so
much so much happening
in the meantime we had a pretty slow 2015 and 2016 picked up again um 2015
still coming off
uh slow and gradual drop in the price people were very reluctant and skeptical
the media was constantly
bashing bitcoin and then um at the same time we saw this really interesting
phenomenon where the
banks started getting interested in this thing but not bitcoin itself no um the
blockchain the technology
behind bitcoin um which is rather amusing i i i look at that a bit as if you
know the horse buggy
association of america is going oh we we like this automobile thing you've
designed but we have a very
big investment in hay and horses and stables and veterinarians so um we're
going to use the technology
behind the automobile the pneumatic tire and we're going to revolutionize horse
buggies but in all
fairness i think what you're saying is hilarious but in all fairness it is a
weird thing to invest in
like to go all in on bitcoin i mean i know you do it but you also make all of
your money this way and
this is you know you're you're a proselytizing person when it comes to bitcoin
right um for good reason but
for the the average person say who's saved up actual cash money their whole
life and is involved in this
established system of money to throw all their money into bitcoin that would be
insane you watch the
money fluctuate it goes up and it goes down well i'm think i'm glad you said
that that it would be insane
no that's that would be a terrible idea right but don't you think that that's
probably why the media
bashes it and why banks are just looking at it going hmm like people see that
there's a growing number
of people that are using it for transactions there's bitcoin atms now and
people are using
it to to purchase things there's several companies that accept bitcoin for for
products for actual real
physical products but yeah but i mean it's not an investment and it shouldn't
be treated as an investment
um i mean i don't even mean like as an investment i mean as like a primary
source of money of if you
decided to take all of your money not as an investment but just say i'm only
going to live off of bitcoin
i'm going to spend bitcoin like your money's going to go up and down like yeah
that's going to be
really hard especially if you're um if you're accustomed to privileged banking
like if you have
the kind of banking that we have in this country if you actually have access to
that and you have a a
nice visa debit card and um you don't pay account fees and your money doesn't
get confiscated by a
dictator too often and you know you can earn your money and interact with other
people then why why would
you use bitcoin the simple answer is that's not really the use case but there
are lots of people
around the world who simply don't have access to that and for them you know in
many cases
bitcoin is the stable currency you know ask an argentinian a venezuelan a brazilian
cypriot a greek and the list goes on and on and on whether they're worried
about volatility
in bitcoin and in in many cases if they've heard of it if they've used it that's
the stable currency
their national currency is far far worse right did you say brazil yeah brazil
has had a massive
devaluation in the last year how much devaluation because i know that they
have experienced some sort of a really radical economic downturn which is
really interesting
because a few years ago when we first started going into brazil their economy
was booming right
we i'm saying the ufc yeah they're in a currency crisis right now massive
currency crisis what's going
on well apart from the political crisis that's going on and i won't speak for
that because i'm not a
brazilian but you know they've had impeachment proceedings they just impeached
their president
um there's been a lot of economic difficulty with the country and i think their
currency has devalued
almost 30 percent in the last year 20 or 30 percent some staggering amount
currencies don't move like
that mainstream national currencies that have very large economies behind them
simply don't move like
that we've seen it happen only a couple of times we've seen it happen in greece
and cyprus during the economic
crisis we saw it happen in britain uh during brexit and we've seen it in places
like brazil venezuela
argentina and places like that how much currency did how much of a percentage
of britain you lose
during brexit almost 20 in a day wow and three things responded to that in the
opposite direction gold
the japanese yen and bitcoin heading in the exact opposite direction uh bitcoin
climbed 20 that day
almost really so did britain rebound um it did a bit but it's still in historic
lows uh multi-decade lows
so they took a really big hit and what we've seen again and again is at times
of crisis um we see this
pattern repeating where people use bitcoin as a safe haven investment to get
money out of national
currencies especially where there are very strict currency capital controls so
one of the reasons we've
seen uh bitcoin probably one of the reasons we've seen a lot of activity with
bitcoin in china
is because of currency controls every time the yuan the chinese currency uh devalues
against the dollar
and it's done so i think four times in the last year every time there's a
massive uptick in bitcoin
buying in china so people are parking the money in bitcoin or using it to
convert it to other currencies
and get money out of the country so what is the biggest fluctuation that
bitcoin has had um well it depends
whether you look at it on a monetary basis or on a percentage basis if you look
at the movements now
it can go up 30 40 even 100 bucks in a day um which seems like a lot um but as
a percentage the biggest
fluctuations it had were in 2010 and 2011 uh when it rose from under a dollar
to over 30 dollars and then
back down to under a dollar uh in a period of a couple of months now for people
who don't understand what
this means when you're when you're saying it a hundred bucks or a dollar or
thirty dollars like what
what is that in relationship to one bitcoin one bitcoin equals thirty dollars
it did in 2011 and what
does it equal right now 617 617 dollars jesus it was uh about 230 at the
beginning of this year so it's
seen a massive ramp up and a renewal of interest that okay so massive ramp up
but like what's the fluctuation
so if it's at 616 is that what you said yeah it's tripled since the beginning
of the year almost is it
possible that it could drop to like 200 tomorrow yes see that scares the shit
out of people yes and and
which is why you know at the but here's here's here's the truth over the 70
years that it's existed
the volatility as a percentage has been going down every single year so as the
economy gets bigger the bigger it is
the more stable it is it doesn't get buffeted around right it's just like a
very large boat doesn't get
pushed around by the waves bitcoin is like a zodiac next to the u.s dollar's
titanic and the little
zodiac is bouncing up and down on the waves a lot right and it might be
uncomfortable at times of course
if you're heading to an iceberg you want to be in the thing that can actually
turn on a dime
that's a good way to look at it i don't know if it's a fair analogy but it's a
good way to look
at it it's volatile and and that's part of it's part of the fact that a 10 to
12 billion dollar economy
stretched across the entire globe is a small economy as a currency now in the
interest of making this a
standalone podcast so people are not going to go back and listen to all the
other podcasts that we've done
explain very briefly if you could what is bitcoin and how does it work i'm glad
i have this opportunity
to do it again because every time we have a new audience so bitcoin is internet
money it's a system
of money that exists on the internet was created on the internet and it allows
you to send and receive
value the same way you can send and receive an email anywhere in the world
instantaneously without
intermediaries and that's kind of what you see at first glance behind that it's
a whole platform it is
as the title of the book says the internet of money it is it is a set of
protocols that allow you to
basically exchange value with other people but you can do a lot more with it
than just that
most people will use it as a currency it's basically money that you can
transmit from your smartphone to
somebody else's smartphone directly just like cash but electronic and the thing
about it that's unique
is that it's not owned by any corporation any bank or any government just like
the web isn't owned by
anyone or email isn't owned by anyone and there's lots of companies that can
send and receive email
there's lots of companies that can set up websites there's a lot of companies
that can set up applications
that use bitcoin and i should say that when you set it up for me the first time
you did it uh a bunch of
people donated bitcoin so what i did was i said whatever people donated i would
match i would double
it and then we would donate it to fight for the forgotten to build wells in the
congo yep and we built
i don't remember how many justin ren said but it was uh i don't even remember
how much money but it was many
thousands of dollars people donated and then i doubled it and then we sent it
over to the congo so yeah
the bitcoin community is very generous is my point that that is true and part
of that generosity uh comes
from the fact that a lot of the people in this community are very excited about
this technology
and want to share it with others they want to tell other people about this
technology
it's really quite interesting what happens when you create a form of money that
is truly global
we really don't have forms of money that are truly global if you even even with
your very advan