Show Notes
Gerbz's 10th Anniversary
Gerbz: Good morning! Today is the 10 year anniversary of me buying bitcoin.
Gerbz Jr.: Holy shit. Wow.
Gerbz: I tweeted out, "Started building a position in @Bitcoin on Tuesday @ $253. Makes me feel stupid and a genius at the same time. #WhatElseIsNew?"
Gerbz Jr.: Same shit happens at $34k.
Gerbz: Yep, exactly.
Gerbz Jr.: Oh boy.
Gerbz: And I checked it out - this was tweeted out on November 7th. Today's November 5th. I figured out what day Tuesday was back when I tweeted that, and apparently Tuesday was November 5th. So here we are!
Remember, remember the 5th of November. Here we are. So 10 years ago today. And when I started doing a little research for this, I was going to do an episode about 10 years.
What does it mean? How's that happen? I dug through my email and it's just you and me going back and forth about Bitcoin for weeks. You're the only one, and it's just you. So I'm like, man, I was about to record this episode. When I saw that, I was like, I got to get you on here. Even if it is 6:30 in the morning... which it is!
Gerbz Jr.: Another day in the life over here.
Gerbz: We're squeezing it in! I wanted to go through all sorts of fun emails from back when we first discovered BIT-coin, two words.
Gerbz Jr.: 2013, right? I was 3 years out of college and starting to make a couple of dollars and you were hitting me up about this tech that I kind of “barely somewhat understood” - but you seemed to really know "what was going on" - somehow. And I kind of followed your lead and ended up moving some bucks into it. And at the time that was a lot of money, man, a lot of money.
Gerbz: Definitely. It was. And you know, we probably a few grand at it. I bought 10 bitcoin. That's what I remember was my thing. So at $253, that was $2,500 bucks. I caught my first Bitcoin right there. We'll go through a few charts!
This is Bitcoin on November 5th, 2013 - when I bought my first - and you know, I don't think even actually knew there was a halving!
Gerbz: I was like, entry-level. I had dipped my toe in the rabbit hole. And also, I don't know if I knew what logarithmic charts were either at that point. So this is actually what the chart looks like.
Gerbz Jr.: Oh my God.
Gerbz: Right? I was basically buying a breakout. This was the first pump of all time when bitcoin hit $200 bucks.
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah. And look, at that moment, you had to have just been looking at that thing going, "Fuck, I missed it from $12!"
Gerbz: Oh, of course.
Gerbz Jr.: Like, “I am going to ride this back down to 12, but you know what? I can't hold myself and I'm just going to do it."
Gerbz: Yeah, a few months earlier, it was $100 bucks. So I, caught a double! And you know, two months. And I just remember FOMOing hard because Coinbase at this time was real, real early. And we'll actually see how early it was in some of our emails together. But I think it took days and days to get verified in order to buy Bitcoin. It took like a week in some cases.
So here's the chart. This is where I first bought. You bought right here as well, maybe a couple of days later. I actually know that I also sold my Bitcoin at $1100 because I was freaking out. Sold all 10 of them, got the biggest, fastest return in my investment career at that point. And then I went all in on Bitcoin. For the rest of my life at the top as, as we do as every - that's how everyone enters this world, right?
Nostalgic Emails
Gerbz: All right, so let's hop in here. This is an email that I sent to you on Tuesday, November 12th, 2013. Unfortunately, this isn't me being like, "Bro, you gotta check out this thing out!" That conversation must've happened over the phone. That's all I can imagine is I was talking to you about it. But I sent you an email called "Bitcoin stuff" and it was just like…I probably told you at the end of our call, like, "Bro, I'll send, I'll send you everything I know."
And it's shocking that it's pretty much what I would send someone today. I wish I knew I had this email before! I could have posted it on the website and and it would have been helpful for people, honestly.
Gerbz Jr.: I mean, that was the hardest thing. Whenever you talk to people, it was like, “Alright, let me send you some stuff.” And then you would just be like, “where do I even begin?” Cause you've got all these things in your brain and you're trying to simplify something that's very complex - that you still don't quite understand completely. And I remember spending so much time drafting up these emails, and I'd get like a template and I'd use it for six months and send it to everyone.
Gerbz: I did too. I actually sent this email to a few other people, a few other buddies - my buddy Brandon Marks, I sent him this email, and I was like, "Let me know if you have any questions." And he replied back, " How do I make money?"
Gerbz Jr.: That's normally what it comes down to!
Gerbz: I'm pretty sure, knowing him, he did not buy bitcoin at this time. Only you and I did, which is actually one of the beauties of going down this rabbit hole I was discovering, and we've talked about this before - you were the only one I could convince my with my crypto jabber.
Gerbz Jr.: Must be superpowers! Your little brother…the only dude you can convince.
Gerbz: Exactly. Yeah.
Gerbz' 2013 Bitcoin Breakdown
Gerbz: So go through this here. Let's break down what I sent you about bitcoin. We can go through it pretty quick. Alright, so…”There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins mined, ever. The creators of Bitcoin...”
Gerbz Jr.: Ah, the creators, those guys.
Gerbz: Those guys, they “already mined 6 million of them before taking it public.”
Gerbz Jr.: Was it an IPO?
Gerbz: The first ICO maybe! And then I linked to a couple of YouTube videos. These are like the OG "what is Bitcoin" videos. I should have pulled them up, but I didn't want to play them on here. But they're like very, very simple Bitcoin videos. And then there's one here about a Bitcoin mining. And if you watch both of them, you’ll just be like, "woah." Basically, that's what you get out of it.
Continuing with the email…”How it works, a little bit of a technical explanation, and where Bitcoin came from.” I link you to Satoshi's first email - you know, when he announces the white paper. Speculation on who Satoshi is. Coindesk was apparently around. And by the way, all of these URLs are HTTP. No HTTPS. Isn't that funny?
The “market cap.” CoinMarketCap didn't exist back then when I was looking at bitcoincharts.com, which doesn't exist anymore. And then, you know, I tried to convince people that this is a good investment opportunity.
Gerbz Jr.: Of course.
Gerbz: I also mention people who you're co-investing with - the Facebook founders...
Gerbz Jr.: Of course.
Gerbz: The Winklevoss twins are getting in on this. “They own 1% of the entire Bitcoin economy.” I made sure to point that out. And Chamath Palihapitiya, all our old Facebook guys...
And then ways to buy Bitcoin: you can buy it in person. “Benefits of an in person transaction include anonymity, transacting cash, and instant transfer.”
Gerbz Jr.: I think that part probably blew people's minds.
Gerbz: And LocalBitcoins? You know, they were big for a long time. I think they finally got taken out by the government in some weird way.
Gerbz Jr.: Well, there was something there. It seemed like it was "Oh, this is this is the way to do it completely anonymous," but then it just started seeming very weird and sketchy.
Gerbz: Yeah. I mean, it's just the idea of signing onto some website, connecting your bank account - that was the other option, right? So if you had cash, and especially if you wanted to do it anonymously, you would just buy it from another human, in person. Do like a sketchy, Craigslist style kind of meet and greet, swap cash for Bitcoin.
Gerbz Jr.: Using the government's anonymous monetary system..cash.
Gerbz: Yeah. Exactly. So you could buy it in person. Oh, and BitCoinary. That doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. Next option is: You can buy it through an exchange, "similarly to how you would trade stocks," I say. Using Bitstamp or Mt. Gox. Why not? Give Mt. Gox a try!
Gerbz Jr.: Put everything you got in there!
Gerbz: You know, lucky for us, I think we couldn't figure out Mt. Gox. You had to like, go to 7-Eleven and deposit cash... luckily we didn't get into Mt. Gox. Next, I listed an investment trust…we would never do something like that - I don't know why I even put it as an option! Or last option...Coinbase. If you want, you can try that!
"You can also accept it as payment." Bitpay still exists to this day. One of the most popular payment processors in the crypto space. Or you can trade it. "You can trade it with Bitstamp or Mt. Gox" - or some terminal called rtbtc.com.
Continuing, I link to some APIs. And then I have to give you as the last little insight, a live stream recording of Bitcoin crashing down to 10 cents.
Gerbz Jr.: That was your way of saying "This is not investment advice." That was your disclaimer." And here it is going to nothing - just so you can watch it in real time!"
Gerbz: Exactly. I think we've all seen this recording. This guy who's just like - real time. You're just watching the price crash, crash, crash. And he's freaking out. It's an old, old video.
Gerbz Jr. Sees the Light
So November 20th. You reply, you say, "I still haven't gotten the money deposited into my account for verification. The below website has some pretty bad reviews of bit coin." Toward the bottom part, "Have you heard much about their customer satisfaction, etc.?"
Gerbz Jr.: Oh, shit.
Gerbz: I think you're talking about Coinbase, but...
Gerbz Jr.: Maybe I called it bitcoin by accident?
Gerbz: Yeah, you're like, “bit coin has some pretty bad reviews.”
Gerbz Jr.: Oh, shit.
Gerbz: Yeah, you're like, "I don't know…."
Gerbz Jr.: And then I'm sending you a HowDoYouBuyBitcoins.com link, my goodness.
Gerbz: And this is like, you know, quite a bit later. I'd bought two weeks sooner. I think you're waiting for your money to get on there.
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah, yeah...November.
Gerbz: And what I remember we ended up doing, there's not a lot of detail about this in my email...but I like, bought bitcoin on your behalf, and then you wired me money.
Gerbz Jr.: Yep. I think that's what we ended up doing.
Gerbz: And then we like, did a little swap, because you just couldn't get the money on there quick enough.
Here I'm saying, "Damn, dude, I had my finger on the trigger to buy more last night at $443. But Coinbase didn't have any bitcoins to sell. Frustrating, I know. They are growing their team at an insane pace and going through growing pains. It's still the most legit option around as far as I've seen."
So, I don't know if you remember this - you'd go to Coinbase, there was no chart, there was no placing a limit order. It was like a form, just like a basic form. It showed the price, you could type in how many you wanted to buy, and you just hit buy. And then it would just say, sorry, there's no Bitcoins are available.
Gerbz Jr.: Oh my god. I don't even...
Gerbz: That was it.
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah. I literally don't even remember that.
Gerbz: You know? Yeah. They were Bitcoin only for a long time. And it wasn't an exchange. You would just sort of like buy from them, or sell to them. That's how it worked.
Gerbz Jr.: Yep. And they were probably taking that order and on the backend just manually purchasing it or something. Who knows?
Gerbz: I don't know where they were getting their bitcoin. That's a good point.
Gerbz Jr.: They had they had a guy with cash going to the physical place. Crazy.
Gerbz: The Localbitcoin guy, exactly. They had a guy planted at Burger King, and when they got an order and they would just call him and then he'd bring in the next walk in...
All joking aside, I reply saying "Man, I tell you, I can't buy bitcoins because Coinbase doesn't have any.” And you're like, “burn, Bitstamp looks pretty legit.” We've never used Bitstamp, actually.
Oh, maybe we did, because the next email I say, Bitstamp was down all night. So they're having issues keeping up with demand, too. And I'm like, I don't want to connect my bank account to some random foreign company that doesn't have the same protections required to do business in the U.S. "Bitstamp is in Slovenia. Where the fuck is that?"
Gerbz Jr.: Look at us trying to - we're taking this completely just distributed, black market tech and trying to like formalize and justify why It should be some legit banking company, But it's just our brains seeing how sketchy this seems. And it's hard to throw money at it. We're coming up with all the reasons...
Gerbz: But we're also FOMOing, right? We're like trying to buy, we're tracing this shit down. We're going to go to the corners of the earth to find these...these bitcoins, right? And I'm like, oh, I just stumbled on this interview with the CEO of China's largest Bitcoin exchange, BTC-China. And then I send you a video of that and you're like, good find. "And his younger brother founded Litecoin. This should be us."
Gerbz Jr.: God, I have no recollection of any of this shit.
Gerbz: "This should be us." I agree with that. I agree with the previous version of you. That should have been us.
Mt. Gox and FOMOing
Gerbz: So this was our, this was our next little thread here - I also can't help but hop over to Mt Gox. This is the chart that I was using at the time. I, for whatever reason, I wasn't using the Bitstamp chart. Bitstamp is the longest running chart in Bitcoin, which is why we use it for a lot of stuff. If you go to the Bitstamp chart, most technical analysis guys use the Bitstamp chart because it just goes all the way back to September 2011. So it kind of has the most history. Here's a fun view to see where we bought there:
But yeah, so the Mt. Gox chart, this is the one that I send you in the next email. Let's check it out here. So this is the next day. You said, "Finally all good to go on Coinbase. Thanks for the transfer." That's how I remembered.
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah, yeah, that's how it went down.
Gerbz: "So the real question is, do I wait for the dip here? From this crazy run? Will there ever be one? Or will I just continue to regret...?"
Gerbz Jr.: Some things never fucking change.
Gerbz: "Looks like today might be a big day if Bitcoin gets approved for political donations..." Yeah, so we're already on crypto Twitter. We're following the news. We think some big event is happening - it's like the ETF of its day.
Gerbz Jr.: It's all the same shit.
Gerbz: There's always something like this, right? This thing, that this catalyst that we're waiting for, that's going to change everything. And then you're asking me for some investment advice here, which I think it's legal between brothers to give financial advice? Let's pretend like it is. “Have plans of purchasing more here in the short term?” I'm like, "Yeah, I'm still pissed I couldn't buy more two nights ago, but I'll buy more on the dip. But I might buy some at $800 too." And we were just talking about $400!
Gerbz Jr.: Now we're double. Couple days later.
Gerbz: “Yeah, if it looks like it's going to break out of that range, I'm going to buy some more apparently. Remember that chart I first showed you? It held up amazingly well. Click the play button on the right to draw the new lines that happened since I made the chart.”
This is the Mt. Gox chart that I linked to here. "The old resistance line became a support line. The way it bounced off that line is super bullish. If it breaks through in a strong way, then watch out below. But otherwise we should chill above that line or higher. We're in new territory."
I'm talking about that beautiful resistance line that we're just breaking above. But fun part is when you press the play button. So the play button shows what happens after the moment I created this chart, right? Boom! So we get the play button, we get a massive breakout, we retest it, and then...
Gerbz Jr.: 2nd retest. Fucking out.
Gerbz: Not just that, this is the end of Mt. Gox. This is Mt. Gox getting hacked, all the coins going bye-bye. And the end of the chart, there's not another day for Mt. Gox printing another price.
Gerbz Jr.: Wild. And it stays right above, before it goes off, stays right above that support line there at bottom.
Gerbz: That is weird, right? What are the chances? But yeah, this is it. This is Mt. Gox going offline. It's done. And they're still trying to figure out in courts how to get these bitcoins back to some people, right?
Gerbz Jr.: I was down to $100 bucks. It shows on here. Do you remember what it ended up going down to?
Gerbz: I don't, but we can look at it right here. Boom.
Gerbz: End of Mt. Gox crashes here. So that's us. $100 bucks. I mean, I think the Mount Gox price started to completely decouple.
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah. Who knows? Yeah.
Gerbz: Because it was impossible to get money there and impossible to get it out. It went offline, but this is the end of it right up here. This was the Luna of its day. This was the FTX moment. This is the first big FTX moment in crypto, right? This is when we all discovered "not your keys, not your coins." This was the beginning of that.
Gerbz Jr.: And think about that. That's like "the end of frigging Bitcoin" in everyone's brain at that time. And look, you're still, you know, you had a little retrace, right. And little being, you know, $1150, $1200, down to $470. But once again, you zoom out, it doesn't even look that bad. Right? Good reminder. Cause we still deal with that shit today.
Gerbz: We deal with it all the time. Every cycle has its boom and bust. Right? And so this is the crypto winter, bottoms out at $150, which is like the top of the previous little bump that it had on its way up. Bottoms out at $150 at the bottom of crypto winter, and then it goes on its next run, which we'll get to.
Getting Into Some Shit...Coins
Gerbz: So yeah, so that was our chat about, FOMOiNg in at maybe $800, which was still in, right? This is November 20th. And so the next email, this is the 23rd, a couple of days later, I send you coinmarketcap.com. I guess that existed! Oh, "market caps for each alt currency." Right? So this is, this was the next part. This is us getting into shitcoins.
Gerbz Jr.: Yep. This is the intro.
Gerbz: One week later.
Gerbz Jr.: Our lives have never been the same.
Gerbz: We're ready to go. We're shitcoining already. And you're like, “good find! So what's the best way to go about buying some of the following? I think it's well worth the risk for both of us to throw some cash at these just in case. Beyond quicker algorithms for mining etc, any of them really standing out?"
And so you copy and pasted a few of the coins from coinmarketcap, and so obviously Bitcoin was number one still at this point, but then there's Litecoin, Peercoin, Namecoin, ProtoShares, and Feathercoin...
You're asking me like, let's get in on some of these. Bitcoin did so well, right? Let's get in on some of the rest. I say, "Litecoin is the only other one that seems promising at this point. Feathercoin seems way too early and is focused on community. Namecoin isn't really a currency, but is as far as other interesting attributes, Namecoin definitely fits that."
And then, I linked to a stack exchange is talking about Namecoin - which was like the ENS of its day. It was where you could buy decentralized domain names on the blockchain, and it was like a Bitcoin fork.
Gerbz Jr.: Talk about early.
Gerbz: Yeah, I don't think either of us ever got into it. So yeah, I'm like “Litecoin is the only one.” And it's like, "How do you buy Litecoin? I want to get some tonight!"
Gerbz Jr.: Oh boy. I'm hooked.
Gerbz: "I've read to transfer Bitcoins from Coinbase to Litecoin? On what, BTC-E?" And this is when we discover BTC-E - which got taken out by a government. I don't remember the backstory.
Gerbz Jr.: I could have sworn I bought some of my early bitcoin on BTC-E also, and then transferred it, but maybe not. Maybe it was always Coinbase, and maybe it was Litecoin and stuff that I got on BTC-E.
Gerbz: So, we never connected our bank account to BTC-E. Stablecoins didn't exist. So, the only way for us to get crypto off or on BTC-E, which is where they sold LTC, was for us to buy bitcoin on Coinbase and then transfer it to BTC-E. And then buy litecoin with bitcoin.
Gerbz Jr.: That's right.
Gerbz: Oh yeah, this is what I go over right here. "Create a BTC-E account. Go to finances, click deposit next to BTC. This gives you a Bitcoin address to send bitcoin to. Go to Coinbase and send BTC to your BTC-E address. It takes some time. Now buy Litecoin." That was my process.
Gerbz Jr.: Man, I can only imagine I read that and thought my Bitcoin address, I was looking at all the numbers and algorithms is probably just, going "wtf...?"
Gerbz: "What am I doing?" And, you know, we weren't doing self custody yet either. We were holding on Coinbase. We were transferring from Coinbase directly to BTC-E. imagine doing like that today. And it's funny, if I go back in my Coinbase account, they've like scrubbed all of my transaction history from the record. They don't even want me to know what I did back then.
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah.
Gerbz: Yeah, apparently Litecoin was mooning here. What's that?
Gerbz Jr.: I was going to say just, legal and compliance probably goes, "Hey, if we don't have it, it's not searchable. Let's get rid of that shit!"
Gerbz: ”Get it out of here!”
Gerbz Becomes A BTC Maxi
Gerbz: So yeah, this is, this is the last email, actually. The next stuff is just me going down the e-commerce rabbit hole. This was 20 days later - I went all in on Bitcoin here.
Like I actually, I sold a lot of Bitcoin at the top of this, so to speak. And then I started accepting it as payment for my marketing company. And then I spent the next all of winter - 2014 through 2016 - just losing man, just hurting, believing - believing, but hurting, which is exactly what we just went through over the past year.
Gerbz Jr.: Year and a half. Yeah.
Gerbz: This crypto winter, waiting for the halving. You know, we didn't have a PlanB at this point or our stock to flow analysis, or understanding that the halving kicks off a supply shock.
Gerbz Jr.: Or really even knowing that things come back, right? This was like - the risk curve was still much higher at this point. It was like, this thing did this once. It might never do it again, right?
And really no big names talking about it. Like, it was a dark place...and quite honestly, I personally I would have gone away. You stuck at it and whenever we talked, you were like, just so fired up - and I'm like, you know, this is some serious conviction of something that I don't even understanding still at this point.
Gerbz: I was stacking. I was stacking as many bitcoins as I could all the way from 1000 down to $150 - to the bottom .
Gerbz Jr.: To the point that you literally built a company to accept it. Like that was your way of, "If I'm not going to have a bunch of cash to keep thrown at this thing, I'm going to start a company and accept it. Like that was your whole thing, you built a company around executing on this, right?
Gerbz: That's what I did. Yeah. Cause I'd already bought $2500 bucks worth - the most I could invest - and I turned it into 25K, paid my taxes. I had 15K after that. And what am I going to do? Buy more Bitcoin with 15K and just wait for it to happen again? No, I wanted to accelerate that. And the only way I came up with to do it was either to mine bitcoin - which I'm not a miner, it's not, not my thing - or I could get people to pay me in it. And that's why I started my biz. So I was stacking Bitcoin the whole way down and the whole way up.
And there was no crypto Twitter really. The Bitcointalk forums were where we were hanging out, talking about Bitcoin. Satoshi was in there in the early days talking Bitcoin. That became kind of like the place for crypto, and then Reddit. It opened up from Bitcointalk, and Reddit became the spot to talk crypto.
It wasn't until, um, Bitcoin Cash forks off sometime over here in 2017, I believe...that's when everyone went to crypto Twitter - because Reddit became a cesspool of misinformation. So this was the ride, man. That was the ride. That was the memory lane.
The only other thing I found: I sent an email to my buddy, Ian in, 2011. I said nothing. I just sent him a link to something about Bitcoin on Quora. Too bad I didn't listen to my own advice back in 2011. But there probably was no way to even buy it.
Gerbz Jr.: I just realized you said "11."
Gerbz: Yeah. I mean, you had to mine it. It was the only way to get it in 2011 was to mine, because there was no Mt. Gox, even.
Gerbz Jr.: May of 2011. Crazy.
Reflecting on 10 Years
Gerbz: So that's it, dude. That's Bitcoin through the ages. That's the 10 year anniversary, and it's just amazing how similar all those experiences that we had...how similar they are to today.
Gerbz Jr.: For sure. And the fact that we still question things at times with this much information, seeing how much progress has been made, seeing the people involved - it reminds you to just follow the path here. This thing is clearly going in one direction and it's going to be a wild ride.
But, you know, conviction is key. And something I was going to point out too, at this point in time, we went through this multiple times over the course of '13-'18. But we were so fired up that this is what we were talking about. And we'd be at like social gatherings and like, people would look at us like we were freaks. And then when there was bull runs, right, everyone's hitting us up. We’d talk to anybody and it’s like, “dude, how do I do it? How?” And we'd spend time.
Like I put so much time into trying to help people send them information. Come home from parties, and there would be like these three people are like, “Dude, send me more info!” And I would take these emails, switch around the links, send them off to people. I have a thread on here that's got like 25 forwards that I'd edited and sent to people.
And people just, dude, they don't actually do anything, right?
Gerbz: No.
Gerbz Jr.: You'd follow up once or twice. "Dude, you need any help? How was it?" And just nothing. And then every time you see them now - some of these people its 10 years later - “dude, we should have listened to you. I remember when you...but, but it's not too late,right? So I'll do it now!” And they still don't do it.
Right? So you try, man. It's just, it's hard when you're in a lane by yourself, regardless of what it is that you're doing or have done, it's hard to convince people, man. People are busy and if it's not easy, if it's not simple...I mean, nowadays, at least it’s easier. I think you can buy $7,500 bucks worth on your debit card now or something on Coinbase. But, you know, it wasn't always easy.
Gerbz: That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, we were using this sketchy thing called Coinbase. And then we were trying to like...the transferring thing was so interesting, because you remember like ICO mania days when like we were like buying Ethereum on BTC-E and then transferring it to some ICO - and now the same things happen with crosschain - because now we have DEXes.
Right? Before that, it was only centralized exchanges. But we're doing the same thing. All this like, "Oh, I can't get the, money here. Like, can you front me over here on this chain?" And, then I'll transfer you some stablecoins over there - it's the same recurring pattern. Right?
And then to your point about your buddies that you were trying to convince, I mean, maybe this was me not taking my own advice in the first time I discovered it, right? I think with everyone, the first impression is like, "that sounds cool. Maybe I'll keep an eye on it." You know? Like, "I don't really understand it well enough to put my hard earned money into it, but I'll keep an eye on it."
Gerbz Jr.: And that was your best advice - buy a little bit, even if it's $10 worth, buy a little bit. It'll make you a little bought in and you'll follow it. And I mean, that was the best. Anyone that did that actually ended up getting involved, right?
Gerbz: Or unfortunately some of those people were the ones you know I'd be like "Oh, I'll just send you 0.1 bitcoin so you can play around with it and try it out, and don't forget to write down your seed phrase!" They all lost it. Every single one of them. That was not the best way to onboard people either. It's hard to be a Bitcoin evangelist, you know - it always has been, it always will be.
Up Next: 4th Halving FOMO
Gerbz: So yeah. that's memory lane, dude. Luckily, it's gone well for us. I'm so glad of all the people I was able to convince to hop along on this wild journey, you're the one. And here we are, three cycles later, going into a fourth. Boom! Four's on deck.
And we're gonna start getting hit up by all those people again. So what's our game plan this time? What are we gonna do? How are we gonna convince people that - when they hit us up is always at the top, right? So, like, how do we get people now to see it? This is the hard part.
Gerbz Jr.: It is, man. You know, and here's the other thing I've noticed too - is that as soon as you bring it up or you talk to people about it, you start getting just a slew of - any time something negative pops up - they forward it to you, or they send it to you, and it's like….
Gerbz: Thinking about that with bitcoin or crypto...
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah, it's like, we're not doing this so you can just send us all the negativity. People are just very risk adverse - I mean, as humans, that's in our DNA. And you sent me a tweet a couple weeks ago that talked about the risk curve, and where you should try to live at all times - somewhere in the middle, right? Like don't be so risk adverse that you miss opportunities, and don't also be a full "degenerate" and lose it all, right?
And there's this middle ground that - unless you dip a toe in there, it's really hard. There's a lot of shady shit that comes out about crypto in general. It's narratives, it's news networks, it's...you name it. There's garbage that gets out there, the hacks...
We're watching FTX...like do you know how many grandparents, parents, or in-laws - you name it - even people that I finally got to buy some bitcoin or do something... they've been sending me FTX updates every time something shady happens, and you're like...I know it's shitty. It was really shady and this happens every cycle. I'm not surprised, right?
People are going to try to make it seem like what you're doing is risky and it's not right. But you follow the path, have the conviction that Gerbz over here had in 2013 when he was in my ear, and I think that's the key, man. You find something you believe in, you go deep, and you have to invest for the long term and ride out the cycles.
Gerbz: Yeah, I really wish we had some of that chatter about what we believed in. Like, it was all chatter about FOMOing and price and investing and trading, right?
Gerbz Jr.: Well, I think your angle initially was through an e-commerce lens, right? And that was enough. You started having accounts of yours frozen without warning, and money just sitting in accounts that you couldn't access that you needed. And it was like, "Fuck this. This is a new world and a new monetary system, and a new way of sticking it to the man, right?” That's what drove you at first.
Gerbz: Absolutely. I wish I'd put that down on paper though, you know? I wish part of that email I sent to you, I wish there was a thing that was like, "Here's why this is important."
Gerbz Jr.: Even Twitter had nothing, huh? I guess it was too early. I mean, yeah, you were on Twitter...
Gerbz: I wasn't tweeting about it. I wanted to make sure to record my buy because - I don't know, maybe I foresaw this moment in the future, like 10 years. I probably said, "10 years from now I want to look back at that and then see whether I was a genius or an idiot…”
Gerbz Jr.: Yeah, dude.
Gerbz: That's what I put on there. Was I a genius or an idiot? I don't know, I think both because…
Gerbz Jr.: When in doubt, split it down the middle.
Gerbz: Yeah. But my life changed from that moment forward in a lot of ways, you know. And it actually got real dark for a lot of days there, before it got light again, and then dark again, and light again and dark again.
Gerbz Jr.: And that's been my life story ever since.
Gerbz: Exactly.
Gerbz Jr.: I think there's probably a few different narratives you could have taken early on to believe why this was going somewhere. And I think yours was very rare. I think the e-commerce was something that you believed in and were personally struggling with at the time - like the online banking side of e-commerce.
And that's what drove you in, and it didn't matter which one it was that brought you in. The crazy thing is, a lot of these different things that people follow, you know, it could have been a hedge against inflation, could have been an early narrative that people would have taken. All of them would have been fine. They all got you at the same place, but it's interesting to see.
Gerbz: That's a good point.
Gerbz Jr.: They get you to the same place, but you know, some of them are still yet to be determined, right? We still see sometimes Bitcoin being tied to the Nasdaq, right? I mean we see decoupling now. We're starting to see that the "digital gold" narrative. But we keep saying that, but every run we think that's coming. It still might not, right? So you just don't know man. But over the long term, I think 10, 20, 30 years...I mean, these are all gonna come true.
Gerbz: Yeah. That's an interesting point - the primary narrative, even within the core Bitcoin community - has shifted a lot over the years. It was all about payments in the earliest days, and then slowly it became more about “store of value” and this hedge against inflation thing.
We just weren't talking about the store of value narrative at all in the early days. And then once Bitcoin Cash forked off and they were like, "all we care about is payments, let's just build a chain of Bitcoin surrounded by people who care about payments only." And, you know, we've seen how that's gone. It's basically down a lot, obviously, compared to Bitcoin.
So. It's kind of, you just follow the Bitcoin, the chain forks - the chain has this ability to fork the narratives, kind of is what forks off. It's not just the chain that forks off, the narrative forks off, and whatever the strong narrative at the time is the main chain that keeps going. The one with the most hash hash power, the most narrative power.
Gerbz Jr.: The most people believe in, and are running,
Gerbz: Yeah, that's so interesting. And I mean, my understanding of Bitcoin has evolved so much over that amount of time. And, who knows what the next narrative will be, but that's such a good point - that none of them matter.
Like who cares what narrative you believe in, this thing is a rocket ship and people are finding value in it…maybe across all of these narratives, and they're all growing exponentially - so we're all trying to find out, everyone wants an answer to why is Bitcoin up today, why is it gonna, why, why do you think after the halving it's gonna do this, why do you think that, etc. It doesn't matter actually, because it's just going up. That's what we see that's what the chart says.
Gerbz Jr.: It would be a choice of like, are you going to invest in - the early internet or a website, right? It's very similar. It's like, the internet's growing regardless. There's going to be a bunch of different websites, a bunch of different SaaS companies, a bunch of shit is going to come out of this, right? Just find a reason why the internet's going to grow and why it's going to be more than email and just go with it, right?
Gerbz: That's right. And you know, you couldn't buy the internet. You couldn't invest in internet. You know? All you could do was buy into companies building on the internet, or you could buy the Nasdaq. Essentially, it was the closest thing you could do to “buying the internet.” But Bitcoin is a currency and the foundation, and the innovation…all rolled into one.
And so that's really where the opportunity comes in. Who knows where this goes? Like, just like who knows where the internet's going to go? Who knows where it'll go next? It's going into VR, right? Aren't we all supposed to be in the metaverse by now or something? Or the first incarnation of it's going to be on the blockchain, not even on the internet?
Gerbz Jr.: It may happen. We might be in, we're going to be in flying cars with VR headsets.
Gerbz: That's it. Yeah, flying cars are going to happen. They're just going to be virtual cars and we're going to be sitting on our couch at home.
Conclusion
Gerbz Jr.: I think that, you know, I think the most powerful thing out of it is looking back to those times and realizing that majority of it's still the same. There's still times where we hit each other up and go, "dude, we're at 35 right now. It's early. It wasn't supposed to do this. What happens when this ETF gets approved? Is this going to happen? Is this cycle going to start earlier than the rest?"
There's still these "what ifs" - and at the end of the day, the only answer is to dollar cost average. It's still early. I don't think there's a bad time to get in, and stay close to it. This thing's gonna keep going - we know it is over the long term - and there's nowhere else I feel more comfortable putting my money.
Gerbz: I couldn't agree more. And just to add to that also, just be long. This isn't a trade. This is an investment. And that's the only reason we're here today with some Bitcoin in our pocket still, is because we're very long and we didn't sell it all at the top, which was $1100 at the time.
Gerbz Jr.: That's right!
Gerbz: Well, we're going to do this again soon. Hopefully we do more episodes, not just like this soon, but I want to start doing some weekly recap kind of episodes. We can talk crypto, bring a couple of new projects we're checking out, or just news articles that we've seen. Get our take and go down some rabbit holes together here on the BitLift Podcast.
Gerbz Jr.: I love it. Always a good time!