“There is no top price for Bitcoin because there is no bottom for fiat money(currency)” said Max Keiser, Host of The Keiser Report. Fiat money is currency which does not have intrinsic or use value on its own. It only has value because the government maintains its value. Keiser, who is also the Co-Host of The Orange Pill Podcast spoke to David Lin, anchor for Kitco News. “If you are going to price Bitcoin and fiat money, the price is infinity, because fiat money has no bottom, while Bitcoin has no ceiling. If you priced it in ounces of gold, that would be a more valid way to price it,” Keiser continued. “I am not sure exactly what the exchange rate is for an ounce of gold is to Bitcoin. But whatever it is, you can multiply it by a hundred times and that’s where we are headed.”
Max Kaiser joins us today. He is the host of the Kaiser report and the cohost of the orange pill podcast, where he talks all things. Bitcoin. We know you love Bitcoin max. We can tell by the shirt you're wearing. Welcome back to Kitco. Yeah, David Lynn, uh, great to be with you now, max, I have to say, start by asking you about the infrastructure bill that was recently passed in the Senate.
Now there was regulation in the infrastructure build that affects cryptocurrency investors because it states that any broker of cryptocurrencies would have to supply to the IRS. Now it was unclear who qualifies as a broker and that's the concern. It was a very vague definition. It could apply potentially to minors as well.
And so people who may not have information on their clients would have to supply information to the IRS as very confusing. And that could dissuade people from doing business in the U S that can't comply with these new regulations recently, an amendment to this, to this language, the bill was blocked. So how do you see this effect in the crypto markets?
Should we be worried? Right. Well, Bitcoin is a global tier one. Money. We've only had two in history, gold and us treasury bills and whatever the U S does. It's gonna, it can only hurt the U S right. Um, governments don't ban Bitcoin Bitcoin bans governments. And if the us wants to take yourself out of the Bitcoin game, like as Senator Cynthia Lummis was begging and saying, look, we don't want to be left out of the Bitcoin revolution.
Please. Don't be fooled. Uh, there's not much anyone can do. I mean, some countries get it like El Salvador, uh, they're making Bitcoin legal tender. Their GDP has set. The triple property prices are skyrocketing. There's a great feeling of, of, of, uh, enthusiasm in the country. And, and that's gonna, that's gonna follow all over Latin America.
Nigeria is going hyper Bitcoin ization that their economy is set to, uh, do incredibly well based on a Bitcoin standard. So the U S uh, is in the first world, but if they continue this attitude, they're going to very quickly drop into the second world. If not the third. How much of this is due to a lack of education.
Do you think from the Senate, I was reading a CNN article and they were talking about how the average age of the Senate is above, uh, 60 years old. Um, it's a little bit different in the house, but they were also saying how investors over 50, the majority of investors over 50 in the U S have never even heard of cryptocurrencies.
What can we do? What not by we, I'm not just, you know, you and me, but what can the crypto currency community. To educate people in, in Congress, in the Senate and in charge of running the country. The problem is not that we have a lack of education. The problem is that they're mostly crux. And what I mean is they've been living off the fat money hog for decades.
You know, this is the 50 year anniversary that Nixon, the Nixon shock closing the gold window. When we went on a pure Fiat money global standard and the us Senate is one of the chief beneficiaries. They just print a lot of money. They take it for themselves. Entrenched all the Gopal lists and, uh, they're crooks.
So if it takes Bitcoin to clean up the crooked Senate in America, then so be it. They should all be, um, gotten rid of, in my opinion, I think the entire political establishment at this point has proven itself to be worthless. I'm confused as to why cryptocurrencies were even brought up in the infrastructure bill, what does this have anything to do with a $1.2 trillion infrastruct?
Well, none of these bills, uh, have any coherent sense to them. They're 2000 pages. We know that very few senators raid these bills. You know, you asked the question, well, will senators ever educate themselves about Bitcoin? How about should senators read the bills that they're signing into law? We know that they don't, uh, we know that people slip things in at the last.
Uh, to Curry favor with their corporate overlords, principally the energy industry or the defense contracting business, uh, companies that own them. And they do this in a very crooked manner. It's not government buying for the people. It's, um, a core policy by and for the oligarchs. How's this for theory, maybe we're not giving them enough credit.
Maybe they're really smart. Maybe they're purposely making it more difficult to invest in cryptos in the U S so they can make way for their own families. I don't give them much credit to think through things beyond that kind of immediate bag of cash that they'll take under the table. So I don't think they put much thought into it other than their own venal, corrupt, uh, practices.
But, um, as far as fed coin, that's a different kind of topic, you know, to get into. I, I, they, they that's, again. Land on deaf ears. They don't, they, they would have to, they don't know what that means either. And, uh, I don't think that there's a grand strategy behind it. I don't think that you can ascribe any intelligent thought processes whatsoever.
These, these people in the Senate are like goldfish. You just, you can feed them and feed them and feed them. And they're going to eat, eat, eat themselves to death, right? They're not thinking they're just jaws. They just eat. That's all they do. They're parasites. They're like. All right. Well, so let's talk about, uh, central bank, digital currency.
Is that a nice segue it's already happening in other parts of the world? The Chinese central bank is making one. The ECB is considering one, the bank of England wants to make a bread coin. The fed coin is not officially announced, but I pretty sure they're thinking about it. How w how do you see this playing out?
And, uh, what does that leave? Uh, what does that mean? Bitcoin investors will, will, will people be, you know, washed out or is this a better opportunity? Yeah. A central bank, digital currencies don't compete with Bitcoin. They're centralized. They're easily hacked. There are put forward by the same people that do the fat money.
It's just a digital version of Fiat money. We already have digital money from the central banks already. They're just repeating themselves. It's just more of the same. It doesn't compete with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is decentralized it on confiscated it's uncensorable um, it's um, unhackable. So this is a vastly different situation.
Uh, it shows that they're desperate and they're trying to catch up the Bitcoin. And the only way they know how to do it is to kind of do the same thing they've been doing for decades, print money, and pretend like there's not inflation. Pretend like there's not a wealth and income gap. Pretend like they're not causing climate.
Yeah. Well from all the money printing that they're doing, I don't want to make that connection. And they've all know the media. That's why I'm more independent sites, immediate sites like yourself and others are very important because you're willing to go against the mainstream media talking points that are fed to them directly from these oligarchs.
You mentioned earlier that the governments can't ban Bitcoin. How, how about this? Bitcoin may not be a direct competitors to CBD CS and vice versa, but the governments can make it more difficult for you to transact and Bitcoins. Right? We've seen that happen in Turkey. Cryptocurrencies are banned as a form of payment.
Uh, governments can either even ban miners like in China, so they could put obstacles in the way of, of working with and transacting in Bitcoin. Do you see that happen? It's all about game theory. So first of all, if two people want to transact in Bitcoin, any two spots on planet earth, it's uncensorable, you can't stop it because it's behind the encrypted shield.
That's impenetrable. So it's never going to be stopped. That's number one, uh, number two, uh, because we, as I said before, Bitcoin is the first global. Reserve currency, um, money that we've seen since gold and treasury bills and it's global, and we've seen that countries are adopting it and in so doing, they are, um, transforming their economies outside of the U S dollar Gemini, particularly in Latin America, where the dollar is used as a weapon.
You know, the, one of the big mistakes America made was weaponizing the U S dollar by sanctioning around by getting by, into sharing in the swift system. But. By getting by sanctioning, um, the Julian of songs, you, the money to Julian Assange through the PayPal and the credit cards and all those financial intermediaries, they weaponize themselves.
So countries are saying, you know what, we're just going to create our own. We're going to go to Bitcoin and America can drop dead. We don't, we don't care. They're not giving us anything with nothing. They don't ship anything. They don't produce anything. It's all made in China. You know, America is consumer of last resort.
Well, we can get consumers in Africa. We don't need it. The American consumer. Forget them move on. I'd be short VUS, you know, in a big way, you know, the U S treasury bond is probably, you know, I know Michael Barrett. Is short the U S treasury bonds. I know it's been a widow maker for 20 years. Everyone was trying to short the U S treasury bond has been carried out on a stretcher and it's, you know, it's, it's a trade that is, uh, not worked for many years, but at some point it will work and the us treasury bond will drop 50% yields on those treasuries are going to go to five, six, 7%.
And the us is going to have to put out the gone out of business sign. It's going to be there's no coming back. Wow. So you think yields are rise? Well that's, uh, well, let's save that topic for another time, but, uh, but went back to the U S dollar, you know, every time I asked somebody a Bitcoin skeptic, for example, that, uh, whether or not Bitcoin could eventually dethrone the U S dollars a global reserve currency, they'll say, well, Hey David, the us dollar has 11 aircraft carriers floating around the world, forcing people to use the dollar.
What is Bitcoin? Well, first of all, the 11 aircraft carriers, the U S military is the biggest consumer of energy in the world. And because of all the money printing, the cost of energy is skyrocketing. And at some point they won't be able to afford even to fill up the supertankers or their military, because they won't be able to afford the.
And the gas is over in Saudi Arabia. It's a, in the middle east, and it was collapsing like in Afghanistan because of us after 20 years of a failed wars pulling out. So they've losing influence in that region. Saudis are ready to jump ship and do business with China. So they won't even be able to afford their tankers.
Number one, uh, number two, uh, with Bitcoin is uncompensated. Uh, it's unlike the U S dollar or gold, which is confiscated. So it doesn't matter if you show up to my house with, you know, a battalion of Marines, you can't get my Bitcoin, you know, it's secured behind an encrypted firewall. That's impenetrable.
So what are you going to do? You're going to have to try to sweet. Talk me out of my Bitcoin, offer me something that I want to exchange for. And by the way, if I'm unhappy, I'll simply leave. I'll go out where I'd rather live in El Salvador, where, uh, they have seen the light they're ready to embrace. Uh, Bitcoin and outsourced the monetary policy to Bitcoin.
You know, there doesn't need to be a federal reserve, European central bank, bank of England, bank of the Japan outsource your monetary policy to Bitcoin. Let Bitcoin do for, for you, what you couldn't do for yourself. And that is have a sound money. Why is it better than Fiat money and better than gold besides?
Well, I guess it's decentralized and all the other reasons you mentioned, but a lot of politicians would disagree with you. They might say, Hey, look, we've got the dollar dollar number $1 is king. We're going to keep it. And we're not going to let Bitcoin, uh, run, run its course, but they have no recourse.
They can't do. Th that's what's happening in the Senate this week that the, the senators are bickering, blah, blah, blah, and Bitcoin. The neck, Tik TOK, next block. It, nothing can stop it. They move 40, 50% of the mining capacity out of China is silent, you know, Texas and the you Becca Stan, and, uh, the blocks kept coming.
Hash rate dropped by 50 or 60%. And now it's on the rise. Again. It shows you that the network is impenetrable. The network is nothing can stop it now. No, no army, no standing army, no country, no group of countries, the IMF, the world bank, nobody can stop Bitcoin blocks from propagating every 10 minutes.
That's a fact. And some countries realize it and say, we can build an economy around this outside of the U S dollar and be free of the colonial American interests that have been plaguing our region for decades. And they're doing it Nigeria saying, Hey, you know what? We've got 200 million people in our population.
We have problems with our currency. Well, let's just go to a Bitcoin standard and let entrepreneurial-ism rise. But the politicians have nothing to say about this. They're not important in this equation whatsoever. There's no American politician that has anything of any importance to say other than they are now a Bitcoin or like some of them are.
You know, we have a fifth column inside the Senate. We've got at least three senators now that are Bitcoiners. And when the midterm elections are happening next year, this is going to be a single vote issue. There's a lot of, uh, people will lose their jobs because they don't have a good position on Bitcoin.
A lot of new politicians will pick up and get jobs because they are pro Bitcoin. Remember all the politicians in the military and all the apparatus of state is run on Fiat money. And the value of that money is collapsing. And a lot of those people are going to switch over to it. My, you know, you say with politicians, don't like it.
I'll predict here on this show with a hundred percent certainty that within four years, half the politicians in America will be Bitcoiners and working extraordinarily hard to make Bitcoin standard in America. Perfect segue, max, I'm going to show you two charts that more or less illustrate the same.
This is the first one. It's a poll by Gallop. It shows that of U S investors in to the end 2021 only about 6% of people who own $10,000 or more in assets have Bitcoin. This is an improvement from three years ago, only 2% of those investors own Bitcoin. The second chart here is a trend that's been circulating on Twitter.
Um, and this shows the Bitcoin adoption rate on the very right-hand side, the right hand corner is Bitcoin, and you've got a bunch of other technologies. More or less matured over the years. And it shows how little Bitcoin has gained in the adoption curve relative to other technologies, more or less both of these charts illustrate that Bitcoin is not yet very far along the adoption curve.
And there's a lot of room to climb. It's been around for 11, 12 years now. Max, why is it that very few people in America have adopted Bitcoin as either an investment or a store of value? Yeah. You got to look at the global picture. Say they've got 200 million users. And that number is, uh, picking up rapidly.
And, uh, you know, I was back working@a.com in Los Angeles during the nineties. And our member is as late as 19 96, 19 97. You had editorials in the New York times suggesting that the internet was a fad, it was going to go away. It wouldn't succeed, you know, by Paul Krugman there Nobel prize, winning chief economist, a writer, and then suddenly he had that hockey stick moment.
You had Netscape went public. And the internet became ubiquitous globally, and it is what it is today. Uh, and this is the story of Bitcoin. So we're kind of at that 1997 moment, we're already reached it in a couple of countries outside of the U S again, you can't use the us as the standard bearer. The us is lagging right now.
The U S is really not the prime country anymore. When you're looking about the trends of the next 10 years, unless it does a lot of catching up, America's already in the second. When he, in terms of looking through, through the situation through Bitcoin. So it may, it may catch up or it may not. I don't, I don't see America as indicative of what the trends will be in global finance and Bitcoin.
In the next 10 years, it's got to play some catch-up in here. David Lynn, I hope. But if it doesn't, uh, you know, the, every reserve currency changes every a hundred years or so, you know, we went before the dollar was the British pound before that, you know, France had to go, Portugal had to go. And, um, you know, America had its time.
It had a great century. I think it's over. Let's move on to the Bitcoins. Who's the leader right now. You think in Bitcoin adoption, clearly El Salvador and by making big. Uh, legal tender is kind of forging a path in Latin America. Now we've got, uh, seven or eight other countries. I'm now signaled that they're going to go to Bitcoin as a legal tender, uh, Nigeria and Africa, as well as Kenya and a few other countries are now all becoming hyper Bitcoin eyes.
The activity in Africa with Bitcoin is absolutely stunning. Yeah. And in Europe it's a little bit more difficult because the ECB and the EU are much more authoritarian and centralized. It's a very top down autocracy in Europe. So they're having, um, a tougher time than some of these other regions, but it's a bit of a intelligence test.
You know, if you're, if your leadership in your country are too stupid, uh, you're not going to get it. If you have bright, young, eager entrepreneurial leader. Uh, you're going to get it. I mean, the U S as you mentioned before, that senility that prevails in the U S political class is not a feature. It's a bug.
I mean, in America is, looks like the old Soviet union days. And of course they don't understand Bitcoin. Okay. We'll step aside pops, you know, let's let some of these other younger countries, uh, take the lead and that's exactly what we're. So you're not surprised that some of these developing nations are actually taking the lead in terms of adopting this brand new technology.
That, that doesn't seem odd to you. No, it makes perfect sense because they've got the most to gain and they're hungry and they've got a young population that wants to succeed and they're entrepreneurial and they're tired of the colonial games. They're tired of the U S dollar Gemini. They're tired of, of subsidizing.
Remember America's military, it's not paid. By essentially by American so much as it's subsidized by foreign countries, you know, it's the foreigners who send us all their cash. Uh, you know, there are subsidizing the U S military adventurism and I think that's countries like China and others are saying, you know what, we're tired of this.
And we're going to pull the plug. I mean, the situation with China and America is getting quite tense and China has some interesting cards to play in terms of. Uh, what, what they can do on the global currency markets. And I think that's going to be played out pretty, pretty soon here. And then that is a net negative for the dollar.
And once the dollar really loses it a bid and you have more countries doing what Russia has done, which is to divest themselves completely out of the dollar. Right. It's going to be really tough to, um, keep this economy going it's already. Yeah. Running on fumes, you know, inflation's really kicking in David.
I mean, you, you, I know you follow what's happening in the inflation front, and it's, it's really starting to hurt. You know, the prices are really, I see that shore, like restaurants, like shake shack. They're on our fourth price rise in less than a year. That's rippling throughout all the various industry.
They can't just keep printing money to give to people, to go to shake shack and shake shack, keep raising money. And then that causes inflation and then they print more money and they just can't keep doing that. That's why more Republic that's Venezuela, that's, that's that's hyperinflation, and that they don't seem to care.
And most people who engage in those type of reckless financial policies don't care while they're doing it because they're high on money. You just, before we move on to the crypto markets now, uh, max. So how far can inflation.
Unlike the, the Paul Volcker days where somebody like Paul Volcker stepped in and started to impose the same policy of raising rates and, and rebalancing the economy and attacking inflation. It's gone so far now. There's nothing they can do, except keep beating the Ponzi scheme. There is no there's no, the rates are not going to be raised as a matter of policy to rebalance the economy.
They're going to keep printing until the dollar collapses. Um, and, and I think that that that day is coming quickly because the, with the, the inflation, the, the, the policy is the opposite of the Volcker soul Volcker. Responded to inflation by raising rates in this administration and this Washington DC, they're responding to inflation by, by increasing the money printing they're doing.
They're doing exactly what they are doing in Venezuela. The Venezuelan policy, monetary policy in the U S monetary policy right now are pretty much exactly the same.
Okay.