The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below. 

00:00:04:11 – 00:00:25:10

Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon. Today, I have a very special guest all the way out in Toronto, Canada, who just launched a brand new book that is really, really focused on a very timely subject right now, which is Bitcoin. We have Jesse Berger and he is the author of The Amazing Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin. How are you doing today? 

00:00:26:07 – 00:00:28:21

Jesse Berger: Hey, Richard, thank you so much for having me. I’m doing great. 

00:00:29:07 – 00:00:47:18

Richard Carthon: Awesome man. Well, excited to learn more about the book. And again, very timely discussion as Bitcoin and the Crypto market is absolutely exploding. And get to do a lot deeper dive into the argument of where does Bitcoin get its value and a bunch of other hot topics that we can break down today, but before we do, give us a little bit of background about yourself. 

00:00:48:20 – 00:01:06:28

Jesse Berger: Sure thing. So my background, I spent 10 years working on Bay Street, which is sort of the equivalent of Wall Street here in Canada, and I worked in retail banking, investment advisory, I did management consulting and market research. I have my MBA and I’m also a certified Blockchain professional. 

00:01:07:25 – 00:01:18:11

Richard Carthon: That’s amazing man. I mean, you’re prime for the subject and it sounds like you have been looking into this subject matter for a while. So what was that first introduction into the Crypto, Blockchain space? Like what piqued your interest in this? 

00:01:19:10 – 00:01:55:22

Jesse Berger: Yeah, so I first came across Bitcoin actually in 2011 while I was working in investment research or investment advisory, pardon me, but the reason I got interested in it was because I had a background in economics and I sort of was red peeled on Austrian economics back in 2007 when my career began. So before Bitcoin, Crypto, Blockchain, before any of that was even a glint in Satoshi’s eye, I had been going down the Austrian economic rabbit hole and came across Bitcoin in 2011, but didn’t actually purchase any or because I was a banker and didn’t know you know.

00:01:55:24 – 00:01:56:09

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:01:56:11 – 00:01:59:17

Jesse Berger: How I would even hold my product keys or anything like that so.

00:01:59:19 – 00:02:00:04

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:02:00:06 – 00:03:02:15

Jesse Berger: I understood the premise of there was a fixed supply of 21,000,000 coins, I understood the premise that it was issued on a predetermined schedule and I vaguely understood that there was some kind of cost, this energy cost associated with creating the coins, but beyond that, I didn’t understand anything. And that and again, that’s in 2011, but I didn’t start actually experimenting with and using the technology until the beginning of 2017. I got to experience that first boom and bust, that very big boom and bust of 2017 and early 2018. At that point, I knew that I wanted to be involved with Bitcoin, I knew I wanted to contribute to it some way somehow and just based on my background and the knowledge that I had and some of the experiences and skills that I picked up along the way throughout my career, I thought, Okay, you know what? I can pour it into this book and maybe help tell the story of Bitcoin in a way that hasn’t been told before, just to make it maybe a little bit more accessible to broader audiences. 

00:03:03:02 – 00:03:22:01

Richard Carthon: You know that’s interesting because you know, as you’re looking into it and you see like the practicality of it and how it could be used to foundationally change the world, you know, what made you so compelled to like I need to write a book about this, like I need to share this knowledge with everyone in such a simple way that people can understand it? What compelled you to do that? 

00:03:22:20 – 00:04:20:06

Jesse Berger: Yeah. Well, you sort of said it there, it can change the world. Bitcoin is a very profound idea and invention or discovery, whatever we want to call it, but at the end of the day, what it stands for is very, very meaningful, right? The way that I’ve sort of come to think about money is that money is sort of the engine of society, right? So if you think of society as a tree, if it has very rich, fertile soil, you’ll have this big blossoming, beautiful tree, but if you have barren soil, it doesn’t get water, it doesn’t get sunlight, it gets shade it’s going to dry out, it’s going to die. And so I think right now we’re approaching a bit of an end game for Fiat currencies where they’re trying everything in their power except just naturally watering it and giving it sunlight, right? 

00:04:20:15 – 00:04:21:00

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:04:21:02 – 00:05:43:16

Jesse Berger: So this tree of money is dying and that affects society, that affects the way we interact with each other, because money is the basis for commerce. It’s the mechanism that we communicate and interact with each other, that we grow together and when it’s poisoned, right? We’re getting these disastrous results. Bitcoin for a whole swath of reasons that I naturally cover in the book reinvigorates money. It is a completely different way of looking at money and that’s the big challenge for people, is wrapping your head around not only how Bitcoin can be that sort of prosperous, beneficial, flourishing, how it can bring about a flourishing society, but then just understanding that, Okay, well, if it’s going to do that, you need to look at money a little bit differently. And so I think I was inspired by that idea and frankly, we have some good books out there in the landscape right now, but I just thought I had maybe a different way of telling that story, the same story. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I’m not proposing or presenting ideas that are not already known in the Bitcoin universe. It’s more so giving them a different framework to help someone sort of visualize and really maybe wrap their head around it a little bit better.

00:05:43:18 – 00:06:07:07

Richard Carthon: Before the interview started, actually, I was looking into the book and Jesse was kind enough to like tell me one of the unique approaches that he did was each page has its own unique value, where it’s a title where there is also, I believe, a quote, and then also just a subject to go back to that you can always go back and reference. It’s a great way to like, read and take notes and have a point of reference. Can you kind of speak to that a little bit? 

00:06:07:26 – 00:06:40:09

Jesse Berger: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll start with just the straight up formatting like you just mentioned. Yeah, every page is literally its own siloed section and arguments and I included quotes. And the quotes run a gamut of sectors, right? I draw from banking and economics, I draw from politics, I draw from entertainment, like I quote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, like I really, really run the gamut of where I draw my quotes from because you can find inspiration anywhere, right?

00:06:40:11 – 00:06:40:26

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:06:41:18 – 00:07:38:10

Jesse Berger: And every quote relates to that specific argument on every page. And then if you stand back and look at the book as a whole, the idea is that you’re slowly sort of building up and stacking these arguments one on top of each other. And that allows you to build up knowledge in just a way that can feel very clean and you can feel sort of confident with because, Okay, if you’re stumbling on the first or second or third block or whatever it is, you can A, very easily go back to it and reread it because it’s just one page, so you can really try to take your time, get that one argument under your belt before you build up to the next level. But then also once you stand back, you understand that, Bitcoin, it’s not just one thing. I mean, yes, I guess it is one thing, but to understand it, you have to be able to have an understanding of a whole bunch of different ideas that come from a whole bunch of different disciplines. And so the easiest way that I found that I could present that was to do it in those little I’ve sort of called the bite sized pieces. 

00:07:38:23 – 00:07:49:03

Richard Carthon: Yeah. And I think that is a great way to do it. And because a lot of people when they look at Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, what have you, Blockchain, it’s a lot to chew at once and to try to build upon. 

00:07:49:05 – 00:07:50:01

Jesse Berger: It’s a lot.

00:07:50:03 – 00:08:23:12

Richard Carthon: Yeah. And trying to like, drink out of a fire hose, you know, it’s a lot easier to try to get in bite sized chunks, like you said, to build on top of it and to build your knowledge. In there you kind of say like different arguments and different ways of why Bitcoin makes sense when you were doing your own research, I mean, I’m sure you have this specifically placed out throughout your book, but what compelled you to be like, Okay, the world is going towards Bitcoin? Like, what was the argument for yourself or that someone told you where you’re like, Okay, this makes perfect sense to me, this is why I think this is going in this direction. 

00:08:24:09 – 00:08:59:14

Jesse Berger: Right. So the genesis of all of it for me comes down to the question, what is money? Right? And I showed you before and I’ll show it for those watching now, on the back of my book, I don’t have a big description of my book, I just have three words, What is money? It’s the question, right? Robert Breedlove, who is a writer in the space, a sort of well-known figure in the space as well. He called that question, what is money? The rabbit you chase down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, but like I said at the beginning of our interview for me, I started chasing that rabbit before Bitcoin even existed. 

00:08:59:21 – 00:09:00:06

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:09:00:08 – 00:10:15:07

Jesse Berger: And so I was to an extent, I was a goldbug to an extent earlier in my career because I viewed gold as sound money, which at the time it was and because it reigns in a lot of the recklessness and inefficiencies. When money is sound and you can’t just create it from nothing, it forces you to be that much more responsible with how you spend it, because you cannot gain it that much more easily. In addition, it forces those who are trying to acquire money to compete, right? They have to compete to offer products and services and offer higher and higher quality products and services at lower and lower prices because there’s only so much money to go around, and so the net effects of sound money are you get higher quality outcomes with less waste. This is sort of a lesson of sound money Austrian economics that our leaders, I would say, have forgotten or probably never knew about in the first place and so they view money as just this toy that they can use whenever they see fit. But when you create money from nothing, it takes away the impetus from those who actually work hard to earn money, it distorts the value of what they earn now. 

00:10:15:09 – 00:10:34:03

Richard Carthon: There’s two questions I want to follow up on this, because this goes to the core of what Bitcoin is and why it’s potentially a game changer in the world, right? So is Bitcoin a potential hedge against everything that’s going on in the regular markets, in your opinion? And then if so, why? 

00:10:35:22 – 00:12:12:19

Jesse Berger: So I said in my book that Bitcoin is a way to insure against Fiat fallibility. The reason it works or the reason that it can insure against Fiat fallibility is because it is effectively infallible. You cannot mess with Bitcoin, right? It has a predetermined schedule, a fixed limit of coins, all of it was announced the day that it launched. And there was no precedent in the world when it came out, right? It was something completely new to the world. And because every coin that is earned and when I say earned, I mean both through mining or from people buying and selling on exchanges or even doing labor and getting paid in Bitcoin, there’s a cost. There is a real world, tangible cost to acquiring or earning Bitcoin and that is something that we don’t necessarily see broadly throughout the greater Crypto spectrum. I mean, there are different mechanisms and incentive mechanisms for coins and they vary. Those can potentially accrue some value some way somehow, but to me, I find those to be a little bit more experimental, whereas this is very robust, very battle tested, battle hardened. You don’t see an asset like this ever, this is truly one of a kind. Literally, the point of proof of work is for Bitcoin to existentially prove its own scarcity in a certain way. 

00:12:13:03 – 00:12:28:24

Richard Carthon: Real quick, actually I want to stay there for a second. And I’ve had a lot of people like, try to explain proof of work. In its simplest way for you to explain, what is proof of work, how does that then show Bitcoin’s value? Can you kind of speak to that for a second? 

00:12:29:18 – 00:13:09:03

Jesse Berger: Sure, yeah. Your proof of work is literally documenting the effort required to create new Bitcoins and to verify the transactions that are happening on the network. And so, as we’re saying, because the chain is connected and the proof is constantly connected, you are verifying any time you’re verifying the chain, you can verify all the way back to the beginning of the chain. If you were to try to make a change to Bitcoin, to some block you want to take or move someone else’s coins, you would have to undo all that evidence because all the evidence is connected. All the work is proven, right? 

00:13:09:06 – 00:13:09:21

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:13:09:23 – 00:13:51:12

Jesse Berger: It’s literally right there in the title. Again, the way that it’s been executed, the way that all those sort of puzzle pieces of Bitcoin fit together is extremely unique, the way not only that the technology works, but the way that the different stakeholders, be it developers or node operators or miners, right? And then the users, the way they all interact, we all have incentive to be on the same page. That’s one of the things that, again, makes it very unique. And then again, proof of work, that’s one of the best ways I can put it, is that literally it’s purpose is to prove its own scarcity. 

00:13:51:24 – 00:14:11:18

Richard Carthon: Right. And to that point, how is that way more valuable than the current systems that are in place, whether it’s U.S. Currency, Canadian or whatever currency that’s out there? And even what we’re facing in the current landscape, which is COVID times where people are just printing more money, can you make some parallels to that very quickly? 

00:14:12:12 – 00:14:56:17

Jesse Berger: Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, there’s no way in the current environment to actually know how much money is out there, right? There are different levels of measuring money, there’s actual physical cash, there’s deposits and bank accounts, which is broadly, I guess, and M1 the M1 measurement, but then you have M2 and M3. So you have these different sort of measurements of money and at this moment in time, no one can give a perfectly definitive answer of how much money is in existence. Banks can lend regardless of how much they have in reserves. They can create money by issuing a loan without actually taking money from another account to lending it out, right?

00:14:56:19 – 00:14:57:04

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:14:57:06 – 00:15:03:22

Jesse Berger: So they’re just making paper promises. These are empty promises. That’s the parallel, right? 

00:15:04:08 – 00:15:04:23

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:15:04:25 – 00:15:33:10

Jesse Berger: All those promises, there’s nothing actually supporting them, backing them other than the threat of the government to say, “Yes, this is our legal tender, this is what you must use as money.” But it’s someone pointing at you saying, This is what you must use. Bitcoin is completely voluntary and completely, you can verify the entire supply, you can verify your own supply, how much you control with your private keys. It is almost the complete opposite of Fiat currency. 

00:15:33:18 – 00:15:34:06

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:15:34:09 – 00:15:54:08

Jesse Berger: In almost every way it is the opposite of Fiat currency. It is very respectful of the user, it is very responsible with the rates at which it issued new coins, it is respectful to any user who wishes to participate, whether they, again, whether they’re running a node or running a minor or just they want to get on a network to send the transaction. 

00:15:54:29 – 00:16:43:18

Richard Carthon: The reason I want to stay on this just a little bit longer, is just I’ve had quite a few conversations with people who aren’t necessarily in the space yet, who really try to understand this to its core, like where is the value, actually? I think this is just a really good dive into, like the transparency of like Bitcoin itself of like, you can look all the way back to the history of every Bitcoin that’s ever been made ever and follow the money. You can prove that it’s actually there, the work is actually there. With governments, the U.S. dollar used to be backed by gold, it’s not backed by gold anymore, but like to really show where the value is it’s really just based on this is my word, take it for what it is. You can’t really go back and verify everything, right? And like how powerful is it to have that level of transparency in a financial system that works? I mean, I think that’s so powerful. 

00:16:44:12 – 00:16:59:03

Jesse Berger: Yeah. Well, it’s more even than just the transparency, right? The transparency is great and something we should have in money, regardless of whether it’s Bitcoin or Fiat. But it’s, the purpose of money is to be a facilitator of trade, right? 

00:16:59:05 – 00:16:59:20

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:16:59:22 – 00:17:44:17

Jesse Berger: Trade is what lets us know I’m good at one service, you’re good at one product. If we have to barter, it’s going to be hard for us to calculate how much of your product for how much of my service. And then any time I want to go get a different product or service, now I have to do another different calculation. Money becomes that go between where if everyone uses that same denominator, it’s only the one calculation we have to make between products and services. If we have a million different types of money, if there’s a coin for everything, you’re constantly going to be doing exchange ratios, not calculation. You have to figure out, well, what is the basis, like what’s the baseline for value.

00:17:44:25 – 00:17:45:10

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:17:45:13 – 00:18:28:02

Jesse Berger: Bitcoin is special because it can be that baseline for value. Whether or not it will or not, that’s going to be determined by the market. No one individual is going to determine that, but its incentive mechanisms and the reflexive feedback loops that sort of make it very sticky both in people’s minds and their wallets it makes it such that we are, I think, trending towards using that as our basis for commerce because it just makes, again, trade that much simpler when, Okay, we just have this one basis, this one fixed ratio, that we all look up to the same scoreboard and understand, Okay, my product is worth X divided by 21,000,000. 

00:18:28:22 – 00:19:03:02

Richard Carthon: Something else that I want to, you know, ask you about, because, like, I think we’ve spent a really good amount of time here and it’s really important to understand, like what makes Bitcoin powerful and what gives it all of its value. But in your book itself, right? I’m sure there are multiple things that you go and go deeper into to explain from start to finish the importance of Bitcoin. Can you kind of just give us an overall like, Hey, if a person is going to come pick up your book, what will they have learned by the end? Once they have started, once they have finished? Like, what is the takeaway that you want them to go experience? 

00:19:05:14 – 00:19:45:00

Jesse Berger: I’ll give that to you in six words, fix the money, fix the world. That’s going to be the key takeaway from the book, but how you get there, right? How you wrap your head around that idea that better money creates a better society, a better world for all of us, that a better money is a rising tide that lifts all boats, that’s the journey that the book takes you on. So we start just with a simple narrative of Bitcoin is this sort of rabbit hole, it’s this wonderland. You don’t really know what it is and the only way you can grasp it is sort of to go through it, right? 

00:19:45:02 – 00:19:45:17

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:19:45:19 – 00:20:37:19

Jesse Berger: That’s the way I lead off the book by starting with a very simple narrative. Then I go into the origins just to lay out the context for everything, so talking about A, Satoshi’s background, I talk a little bit about money, I talk a little bit about just that 21,000,000, the fixed issuance schedule just to give that context. And then I start to go into money and economics and innovation. So I touch on Blockchain. I go into scarcity, so explaining why scarcity is important not just for money, but scarcity in and of itself, as it tends to be one of the primary drivers of value for anything, right? I use the example of, in popular culture like the supreme clothing label, right? Their shirts, their products, it’s not that there’s anything so special about it, but it has that label on it and they’re only going to make so many with that label on it. And that cachet has value in people’s minds. 

00:20:38:15 – 00:21:37:24

Jesse Berger: Bitcoin is that one system that there’s no replacing it, there’s no copying it. We’ve seen people try, right? We had forks in 2017 and subsequent ones since then, but if the market is your indicator and your indicator or price, I’d rather use the word purchasing power than price. But if purchasing power is your indicator, Bitcoin seems to have come out on top of that and again, for good reason and there’s lots of reasons that I document in the book about that. But so that’s scarcity. I go into competition, so sort of pitting Bitcoin versus Gold versus Fiat versus Crypto in general versus Forks even versus what I called in the book, Stable coins, but now they seem to be central bank digital currencies as they’ve morphed into more. So that’s become the more prominent manifestation of Stable coins, which are still just Fiat currencies, but now represented on a Blockchain effectively. 

00:21:38:28 – 00:21:39:13

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:21:39:15 – 00:22:36:08

Jesse Berger: So I go into that, so that’s Chapter Eight. Chapter Nine, I talk about governance, so how, not only how Bitcoin is governed, but just governance in general, understanding the purpose and benefits of governance. I talk about freedom. I don’t have a whole chapter dedicated to drawbacks, so I try to sort of take a sober assessment of, Okay, I am very much obviously biased. I like Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin is a very unique, very special idea that the world should be rallying around and that the world can benefit from. I want to address the drawbacks because nothing is perfect in the world, right? We have to admit that to ourselves. So I spend a lot of time going through the drawbacks and the shortfalls. And it’s not to say that Bitcoin can’t work because it has drawbacks, it’s just items that we sort of need to overcome if Bitcoin is truly going to achieve what it’s set out to do. If it’s going to fulfill the prophecy.

00:22:37:19 – 00:22:38:04

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:22:38:06 – 00:22:38:21

Jesse Berger: Sort of one way of putting it.

00:22:39:01 – 00:22:39:16

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:22:39:18 – 00:22:42:24

Jesse Berger: And then I have my conclusion at the end where I put a bow on everything. 

00:22:43:10 – 00:23:22:01

Richard Carthon: That’s awesome. Well, thank you for walking us through that progression. I think this book, your book, is extremely timely, especially what’s going on in the current landscape. So, the current Crypto market is becoming reminiscent of the last bull run that happened late 2017, early 2018. It’s an exciting time in the Crypto markets, it’s starting to get a lot more attention. You’re starting to see institutional money start to diversify some of their portfolios into Bitcoin specifically, which is also starting to trickle down into the rest of the Crypto market. What are some things that you’re noticing about the last run and this run and the differences and why it’s important? 

00:23:22:24 – 00:23:41:12

Jesse Berger: Yeah, this time around compared to three years ago it feels a lot more legitimate in the sense that there is a lot more not just institutional interest in purchasing Bitcoin, but the institutional infrastructure to allow them to buy Bitcoin.

00:23:41:14 – 00:23:41:29

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:23:42:01 – 00:24:31:00

Jesse Berger: That wasn’t there in the past, so that part is different. And then the background that we live in, right? There wasn’t necessarily an urgency three years ago for a new reserve currency of the world or a pristine reserve asset, as Ronald Paul called it. Today it’s a different story. Our reaction to COVID on the monetary front was very dramatic, whether it was taking out excessive debt, doing a lot of money printing for governments and so that is sort of reminding everyone of the lessons that we may have already very quickly forgotten from in 2008 or 2007 of the global financial crisis where your money isn’t necessarily yours. 

00:24:31:02 – 00:24:31:17

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:24:31:19 – 00:25:11:20

Jesse Berger: It is our central government’s or our central banks to determine what money is and the decisions they make may not work out in your favor. It may work out, in fact, for a very small subset of people. And if you want to protect against that, that’s what Bitcoin does. That’s one of the things that Bitcoin does. The macro backdrop of Bitcoin today versus three years ago is drastically different. It feels much more legitimate and there’s a greater sense of urgency for something like Bitcoin.

00:25:12:12 – 00:25:44:13

Richard Carthon: Three years ago, everything was a lot more speculative and just like you said, there weren’t clear guidelines of like, how do you really even get involved? Now there’s a lot clearer lines of like, Okay, here’s how we can get involved, here’s safer ways and multiple exchanges that have KYC and everything else that you can go and do that. But then also just, Bitcoin is kind of surviving the test of time. I mean, a lot of these Crypto’s, like the energy and work that’s being put into it, it’s showing that it’s not going anywhere, right? 

00:25:44:15 – 00:26:34:12

Richard Carthon: So I feel in a lot of ways that Crypto is going to go one of two ways, it’s going to crash and burn and nothing or it’s going to be the next big thing. You know, it’s going to legitimize, it’s going to show its value and the value is starting to be actualized. I think the next step in the overall Crypto landscape is mass adoption. And I think we are time away from that, but when you just look at it from what you said, from a monetary standpoint, the value is there. And we live in a digital world, we live in a decentralized world and you don’t have to go through governments to actualize that value. And now governments are realizing that, like, Wow, how do we jump on this? Like, how do we start to figure out how we can be a part of this next decade of value? And I think that’s really powerful because you’re starting to see a lot of countries, One, taking it very seriously and then Two, figuring out how they get in front of this instead of trying to catch up later. 

00:26:35:17 – 00:26:41:06

Jesse Berger: And there’s going to be some dramatic changes as a result of that, I think, over time. Sorry, I’ll let you go on.

00:26:41:08 – 00:26:57:27

Richard Carthon: Definitely. I was just going to finish up on that is just, what are some things now that we’re headed in this direction, we’re at the beginning of this decade, what are some things that you think could be happening in the next couple of years to the next 10 years that that people should be aware of and be looking out for? 

00:26:58:24 – 00:27:53:03

Jesse Berger: For Bitcoin for me, it’s not that Bitcoin is going to change so much. We’re seeing now miners are signaling that they’re interested in Taproot, which is a technology to or a software upgrade to help with privacy and sort transaction scaling to a certain extent. And that’s just another positive step in the right direction. What we’re going to see, I think, for Bitcoin is on the technology side is just more continued progress. People in the past have been, I guess critical of Bitcoin, because it tends to move very slowly, but when you’re talking about an asset that is trying to or could potentially become that pristine reserve asset of the world, you have to be very deliberate with what happens to it. 

00:27:53:05 – 00:29:20:21

Jesse Berger: You cannot afford a single mistake unravels everything, not just for Bitcoin, but for all of Crypto, because the wider Crypto market to a large degree is dependent, I think, on Bitcoin. And so you need to be very particular with it, you need to be very careful with it. So we’ll continue to see progress on that technology front with Bitcoin, but be patient. It’s not trying to move fast and break things, that’s not you know, the ethos of Bitcoin. Whereas some of the other assets that there might be looking to innovate that much faster. Bitcoin is very deliberate because as the base layer of value, potential, final base layer of value for the world, we can’t afford any slip ups. What that will mean for the future, it’s a little tough to say. I think we’ll start to move closer and closer to sort of that Bitcoin standard. It’s still going to be in my mind, it’s not going to happen this cycle. I think it’s gaining that much more legitimacy, the cycle and that much more urgency, but we’re not going to see it happen over the next year or two. I don’t think we’re going to see governments or central banks add Bitcoin to their balance sheet right away. However, they will feel the pressure to start doing it.

00:29:20:23 – 00:29:21:08

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:29:21:10 – 00:29:47:04

Jesse Berger: And maybe the next cycle that’ll happen, maybe they’ll be one or two small central banks that do it in the next year or let’s say. But the pressures are going to be mounting to if you want to be a fiscally responsible country, if you want to ensure the wealth of your citizens, it might be prudent to have Bitcoin. That notion will begin to become more prominent as time goes on. 

00:29:47:27 – 00:30:07:04

Richard Carthon: Definitely appreciate that insight and definitely appreciate all the insight you’ve been able to provide throughout this entire conversation. I think it’s been very powerful, very educational. And you know, we do appreciate you spending some time to share that with us today. Before you go, you know, what is a final thought that you want to leave with all of our listeners here today? 

00:30:10:22 – 00:31:02:27

Jesse Berger: The final thought I’ll leave everyone with is just to consider what you spend your time and energy on, right? If you are working and slaving away and busting your butt to earn value, to create value for yourself, for your world, for your loved ones, for your family and community, make sure you can actually maintain that value. The thing about Fiat, dollars, euros, yen, whatever, is that the value of Fiat is fleeting, right? We get it as soon as we have some in our pockets, we know we can’t hold on to it because it devalues over time. So you feel this burning need to go, whether it’s invest or consume. Invest precludes risk, consuming means you’re basically destroying that value even though you’re going to get something for it, you’re not going to preserve that value. 

00:31:03:21 – 00:32:01:10

Jesse Berger: Bitcoin gives you the option of preserving value, which allows you to plan for the future. And that’s something I think the world is sorely in need of, an impetus to plan for the future and to really start to think forward about, Okay, how are we going to best set ourselves up and our future generations? Personally, I’ve made the case that Bitcoin is the answer to that. Yeah, I’ll leave you with check out Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin. Think about your future, think about what it is you’re earning and why you’re earning it. Understanding money is the thing you need to really focus on. If you don’t know what money is, why money is, why it has value, start there and then you can branch out the Bitcoin and the greater Crypto landscape if that’s the way you end up wanting to go. But start with the money, that’s the thing that you need to think about. 

00:32:02:01 – 00:32:10:01

Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, definitely appreciate that final thought. Appreciate all that as well. What are some ways that people can connect with you and learn more about you and also go order your book? 

00:32:10:26 – 00:32:42:15

Jesse Berger: Yeah, absolutely. So you can connect with me, I’m on Twitter at Jay Berjay J-A-Y B-E-R-J-A-Y. My website is www.MagicBitcoinBook.Com. It’s on Amazon, so if you search for Magic Internet Money or Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin, you’ll find it there. Internationally it’s also on Kobo and a number of other E-reader sites. I’m on most E-reader platforms as well, but the paperback you can only get on Amazon right now.

00:32:42:28 – 00:32:58:05

Richard Carthon: Awesome. We’ll make sure to include those links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for listening and make sure if you’re watching this or if you’re not watching this, go back and check us out on our YouTube channel. And of course, everyone that’s listening, stay Crypto Current.