Making Bitcoin A Currency People Use

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odlod podcast.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Tracy, here's something funny.

Tracy Alloway (0:21)

I don't know why I'm laughing.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

No, we actually, we're kind of have a little bit of a theme going here because on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the same thing we talked about last week.

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

Bitcoin and making and losing a lot of money off of Bitcoin?

Joe Weisenthal (0:40)

Yeah, pretty much, pretty much exactly that. You know, it's funny, like a year and a half ago or a couple of years ago when Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were like surging to the moon all the time. I remember people complaining to us, they're like, oh, you should do more Bitcoin episodes because we actually didn't do very many in 2017

And now Bitcoin and others are in the toilet. Price wise, the bubble's over and now we have two in the row. So maybe we're contrarians or maybe our sense of timing is just completely off on what the market wants.

Tracy Alloway (1:15)

Maybe having done the podcast for two years almost at this point, we are simply running out of ideas.

Joe Weisenthal (1:23)

Yeah, that's just gonna be Bitcoin episodes from here on out.

But this time I think is gonna be a little different. So last time, last week we talked to a trader who rode the bubble all the way up and then all the way down. And this time we're going to be talking to someone who's also still very active in it, but more on the development side and some of the interesting technological innovations that are happening in the Bitcoin world, even amid the Bitcoin winter, so to speak.

Tracy Alloway (1:53)

The Bitcoin winter, I like that. But the general theme is similar to the last episode in that we are talking to someone who still very much believes in the future of Bitcoin and who is in fact actively working to make Bitcoin work. Is that right?

Joe Weisenthal (2:08)

Yeah, exactly. So another diehard Bitcoiner who's been with it a long time. And one of the things I want to explore on this one is, people, even during the ups and downs, people are like, when are people actually gonna use Bitcoin? When will people use it to spend? When will it become a medium of transaction?

And that is something that our guest this week is working on directly in terms of building out the technologies and the layer on top of the sort of core Bitcoin blockchain to actually make it a useful currency for spending. So it should be an interesting conversation.

Tracy Alloway (2:46)

Great, I'm looking forward to it.

Joe Weisenthal (2:48)

All right, on that note, our guest this week is Pierre Rochard. He is at Bitcoin Advisory, which is a firm he launched to help investors do their due diligence when buying Bitcoin. And he is also involved in Bitcoin development. So Pierre, thank you very much for joining us.

Pierre Rochard (3:05)

Thanks for having me on Joe and Tracy.

Joe Weisenthal (3:07)

So before we get started, how long have you, you know, I follow you on Twitter. I have for a long time. You're one of a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist. You don't dabble in other cryptocurrencies. You've had a consistent pro Bitcoin message for a very long time. You weren't just someone who got in the party in 2017

So tell us a little bit about your history and background with Bitcoin.

Pierre Rochard (3:31)

Sure. So late 2012, I was wrapping up my master's degree in accounting at the University of Texas at Austin.

Joe Weisenthal (3:37)

Hook them.

Pierre Rochard (3:38)

Hook them. And at that point, I was hanging out with crazy libertarians as, you know, Michael Goldstein and Daniel Krewis. They're on Twitter as well. And we were debating fractional reserve banking as libertarians do.

And at the time I was a gold bug, sound money, 100% reserve banking type person. Hopefully we won't get into that debate today. And-

Joe Weisenthal (4:00)

We can skip that one.

Pierre Rochard (4:01)

Fast forward. And I, as part of our debate, Bitcoin came up and I had heard about Bitcoin in the context of the Silk Road, but didn't really think much of it. But in this context, we were talking about Bitcoin's, you know, 21 million Bitcoins, it's monetary policy, quote unquote.

And that captivated my imagination and I went down the rabbit hole at that point.

Tracy Alloway (4:24)

So Joe described you as a Bitcoin maximalist, which means that you sort of don't believe in other cryptocurrencies or coins. What's the attraction for Bitcoin? Is it a sort of first mover adoption advantage, or is it something about the underlying technology? What attracts you to it?