Omid Malikin

I think of Bitcoin almost as like a child growing up.

And you know how kids go through different phases of life.

There are the phases where they're good students and maybe they become teenagers and they need to rebel.

Maybe they have a punk phase or a goth phase.

And we're definitely in one of those transitional phases now.

So let's start by trying to define what it is, and then we can talk about where it might fit in.

To me, Bitcoin is a hard currency that comes with its own universal payment system or method of transaction, if you will.

And that's a very special thing, because we've always had hard currencies, like gold is a hard currency, but gold is notoriously difficult to store and even harder to transact.

So when you have something that is as scarce as Bitcoin is, but then you can zap it around the world within minutes to anybody that has access to the Internet, that is a very unique kind of asset, which is why I actually never liked the digital gold narrative that some people ascribe to Bitcoin.

To think about Bitcoin as digital gold is to double click on the scarcity feature.

It's a hard currency or hard asset.

Nobody can print a lot of it.

And for the same reason that societies throughout history have wanted to have some amount of gold, people would then want some amount of Bitcoin.

More recently, a lot of people have really questioned the narrative because

going back now to the last time we made the all-time high, which might've been last fall, I think, the price of gold has really surged and the price of Bitcoin has gone down.

So that's where we are now.

But like I said earlier, I never loved the digital gold analogy because the plumbing aspects of Bitcoin to me have always been just as important

as the, just, it's an asset that has a finite supply, uh, argument and, and just to put this in stark terms, let's go back to, um, when Russia invaded Ukraine, uh, and, and a lot of people quickly rallied to donate a lot of money to the Ukrainian government to help with defense.

Right.

And a lot of people actually donate a lot of crypto.