Bitcoin OG Predicts What The World Looks Like In 20 Years | Simon Dixon

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Simon Dixon (0:56)

The practices of how to secure your key, I think is the most essential skill that anyone needs to learn in the next couple of decades ahead.

So if you can learn it through trying to secure some Bitcoin, and then later that becomes your data, your decentralized AI, your own LLMs and hosted environments, there's only going to be two options. You have to embrace this technology, and you're either going to do it in a way where you control the key, or you give the key to someone else, and they can weaponize your data.

Anthony Pompliano (1:29)

What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great conversation with Simon Dixon. He's an investor and one of the Bitcoin OGs from all the way back in 2011 In this conversation, we're going to talk about some very important topics that are going to help you update your worldview, how capital flows, and who actually is in control of power. We talk about decentralization, sovereignty, Bitcoin, AI, and many other topics that you're probably feeling in your everyday life, but haven't yet been able to articulate. I think Simon has a very unique view of the world, and he's going to help you think through what's happening, where's the world going, how should you invest your money, and what are the things that you should be preparing for to make sure that you and your family are in a much better spot 10 or 20 years from now. Here's my conversation with Simon Dixon.

Simon, you've been in Bitcoin since 2011, and I think over the last decade, 15 years or so, a lot of people who are Bitcoin OGs, they started to dabble in other coins, other technologies, other areas of the industry.

Some of those people were doing it purely for profit motivation. Other people were doing it because they were interested in, hey, how do you take this blockchain technology that got excited about in the early days and then use it for different use cases? Talk a little bit about your journey, and specifically because I think you went from Bitcoin only, you had exposure to a lot of other stuff, and now you're pretty much back to Bitcoin only and see that as the future of where all the value is going to accrue.

Simon Dixon (2:41)

Yeah, thanks for having me, Pomp. So, you know, well, I got involved, yeah, when it was only really Bitcoin, and then people were playing around with forking off and creating different versions, where it's like Peercoin, Litecoin, all these types of things. And, you know, I got involved in the sector because I tried to create a non-fractional reserve bank. So as a monetary reformer, I understood, like, you know, the concepts of banking reform, fractional reserve banking. And that was pretty much my life after leaving investment banking in about 2006 So when I got involved, it was because we couldn't get a banking license for a non-fractional reserve bank.

And then, you know, I was invited to the first Bitcoin conference in Prague, and I was writing a book at the time and it was the first book to include Bitcoin. And so for me, I understood banking as a way of building a bank outside the system. And so we pivoted our bank to someone that was supporting Bitcoin companies. So my first introduction was investing in many of the early Bitcoin companies, Coinbase, BitPay, Kraken, Bitstamp, Ripple Labs, Bitfinex, like a lot of these really early companies circle.

But as you raise finance for these companies, inevitably you share a part of the journey from them all being Bitcoin companies, to them slowly adding Ethereum or adding a stablecoin, or starting getting into tokenized securities. And then they become public companies. And then they're no longer in how I remember Bitcoin, which was us versus the banks in the room, activists. So when you have a business and you're invested in over a hundred different companies, inevitably weird stuff happens. Like one of those companies, say we invested in Securitize and it becomes a security token. Then you have to figure out how to deliver a security token because we were costing assets for other people.