Name: Frito

Country: USA

How long have you been into Bitcoin and what got you interested?

I had heard of bitcoin and dismissed it earlier but I first started reading about bitcoin in the fall of 2013. I had been looking for stocks to buy because even back then it was obvious that it was dumb to sit on USD in a bank account. Bitcoin popped up in some corny stock article. I think it was covered superficially by Motley Fool, which is funny because they have traditionally hated bitcoin. Bitcoin made a lot of sense to me even back in 2013- before the fork wars and before scaling issues have seemingly been addressed.

Best Bitcoin experience and worst Bitcoin experience?

Best bitcoin experience 1: Number go up to the point where I don’t have to be scared of losing my house or losing my job every day.

Best bitcoin experience 2: I have made a lot of friends and I have met a lot of people who have taught me a lot. People like Samson Mow, Saifedean, Jeff Booth and Giacomo Zucco have all been gracious enough to interact with me. Samson had lunch with me and gave me some hats so TBH that has been my singular highlight.

But the best thing about bitcoin is really the friends you make. There are so many. My oldest friends in bitcoin, and the people I talk to the most- are you, Coinicarus, Goon_34, and Bryan Walker. There are a lot of other people I have gotten to know more recently. The number of good people coming into the space seems to be growing rapidly.

What is the biggest fail you have ever seen in the Bitcoin world?

One might think of Breedlove as being the biggest fail but that would be recency bias.

The single biggest fail IMO was Andreas and the community in general failing to call him out for promoting scams and/or denouncing sound money seekers as being "toxic".  

“Crypto” Twitter largely labels one who seeks monetary truth as being toxic. I am here to try to avoid scams. I am here to avoid having my time stolen. When I see something being promoted that delays the progress of sound money or claims to be more sound than bitcoin, then to me it’s a scam. The stupidity increases during bull runs. This recent dip has been nice in a way because it’s less noisy now. 

We have failed thus far to educate the masses in general, as evidenced by the media running with some stupid bullshit that Elon said this spring and having that affect the price so dramatically.

What do you think about the Bitcoin market this last year and where do you think we are headed?

I am confused by it lol.

The recent price drop (we are now down >50% from ATH) has been disappointing. Believe it or not, when one has most of his savings in bitcoin he does not cheer the dip so he can buy more. We have seen similar dramatic dips in previous bull runs but the narrative has been “smarter money is in bitcoin now” and “corporate treasuries are in it for the long haul” so if we are still in a bull run it’s weird to an even more dramatic price drop than usual in the middle of this cycle. 

I am having difficulty grasping why bitcoin price is not already a lot higher when one considers that third world countries with near hyperinflation exist. How are citizens of Venezuela, Argentina, Iran, Lebanon, El Salvador, etc not pumping bitcoin to the moon already? To me it’s bearish that sound money is already life and death in some places yet bitcoin is not even over 1T right now. I have difficulty rationalizing this. 

I don’t think this bull run is over. We are still early in this bitcoin supply cycle. Money printing is somehow still going up. I just got a check in the mail from the federal government simply because I possess a child - and my kid isn’t starving. The need for bitcoin should be becoming a lot more obvious. 

As I didn’t see this price train wreck coming before I am modifying my price prediction for the end of this calendar year to be 100-150k (rather than 200-300k). 

Maybe we are just in one large bull run since Lazlo bought a couple of pizzas in 2010.

How did you get into medicine and what do you love and hate about it?

I got a full academic scholarship for undergrad, didn’t have a lot of direction, and was undeclared for 2 years. I didn’t know anything about medicine or finance and am still slowly learning about these things. I was thinking about getting a chemistry degree but I slowly came to the realization that I might be bored and not make a lot of money (I may have been wrong about this). So between my sophomore and junior years I decided to pursue medicine. Medicine has been relatively good to me but the business of medicine is rapidly getting worse. 

I love that I had the opportunity to learn about it and the opportunity to interact with so many interesting people. I love most of my patients and am blessed to have had an opportunity to have helped a lot of them. It’s getting harder though. Reimbursements are down, overhead is up, and inflation is up. This is a really bad combination and leads to the quality of care being down. Patients have no way to understand or appreciate this. I am not sure my company will be open 5 years from now. In both hospitals and private practice, you do not get credit for time served. Medicine is a very what have you done for me lately type of thing. I think there are much easier ways of making money.

Coming from a medical background, how do you feel Bitcoin can fix our medical system?

I don’t think it can. If subsidies from printed money stopped, hospital systems would go bankrupt in the short run.

In the long run, if both medical companies and patients adopted bitcoin as a store of value, then everybody would be wealthier on both sides and that would allow for more of a free market for medicine to flourish. This is the only sustainable long term solution I can think of. This could be successful in the long run but in the short run there would be a lot of pain (and death).  

On an individual level, bitcoin can allow doctors and patients dissatisfied with the current system to just opt out of the system. This probably means that doctors stop practicing entirely though. It is not at all practical to practice outside of the system. As medicine stands right now there is too much administrative red tape and regulated overhead costs to practice on your own. You would basically be paying to work so that doesn’t make any sense. I think opting out for physicians in this case means just opting out.

Do you know many other doctors who are into Bitcoin?

I know a handful of doctors who have more than their fair share of bitcoin but I really don’t know any doctors that have studied bitcoin. They just bought it as a hedge. When bitcoin goes up they ask if they should sell it. I think for the large part they have listened to me and are hanging onto it though. It’s always cringe to recommend something and have it drop in price. I think most of them are in the black though. 

Doctors really fall into the Croesus yuppy definition of bitcoin. The old system has treated them well to date and they are just on the hamster wheel with their jobs and kids.

How do you feel COVID has influenced Bitcoin’s price movement?

I think Covid accelerated money printing (it was an excuse to print a stupid amount of money to keep an already failing system afloat and a lot of people got rich from the Cantillon Effect) and this accelerates bitcoin’s price movement in the long term. I think a lot of jobs were lost and a not insignificant amount of jobs will just not be replaced because companies were just forced to operate on thin margins and they learned to do that. The use of AI and robotics was probably accelerated. I think retail real estate is getting obliterated.

As jobs are lost more money will need to be printed. This is good for bitcoin. 

In the short term I think it’s hard to tell. Bitcoin’s price went up and then it went down. Maybe emotionally, people feel that we are having a return to normalcy so economically everything is OK. I think that’s naive.

What are your thoughts on S2F and the notion of a super cycle?

A lot of people troll PlanB but I think S2F still might hold true. There is a ton of wiggle room in S2F which just makes it a lot less specific for price targets. The price has already strayed from S2F boundaries in the past so I’m not sure what the rules are about whether or not S2F is still valid. My guess is that bitcoin price stays relatively true to S2F for the next 10 years or so. I think we keep going up in a not straight line.

The super cycle is the notion that we progress to hyperbitcoinization. You know how in Back to the Future Michael J Fox says “guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet”? We aren’t ready for hyperbitcoinization yet. This has been the scammiest cycle on record. Despite the fork wars being over and an actual scaling solution being more or less agreed upon and built upon, we haven’t made a dent in the scams. For fucks sake Breedlove.... The media is still being controlled and BT is a shit show. There is little signal. God bless the Plebs but all I can find are pictures of laser eyes and rainbow dildos. Until we can educate the masses about the importance of gaining sound money (ie: how fucked everybody is without sound money) we can expect bull or bear hype cycles full of nauseating scams. We aren’t anywhere close to hyperbitcoinization, in my opinion. In fact, people’s ignorance to date is overall bearish for me. We are failing to communicate signal.

How do you feel about Doge gaining traction this last year and how do you think it will end and why?

The fact that the vast majority of people don’t know the difference between bitcoin and Doge speaks to our failure to educate the masses. I think Doge trends to zero, making a lot of scammers and dummies rich in the process. The richest man in the world promoted Doge as money when it completely fails to have properties of sound money other than maybe portability. The world didn’t blink when he did this. Doge is an IQ test and the world is failing the IQ test.

Being one of the biggest Star Wars memorabilia collectors I know,, what is your take on NFT’s?

The difference between Star Wars and NFT’s is that Star Wars collectibles actually represent a culture and are something to be nostalgic about. Kids who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s remember Star Wars. They remember having the toys or having friends who had the toys. These things will always have value- and are currently sadly serving as a proxy for sound money where fiat is failing. My dorky Star Wars (and Transformers) collection is holding purchasing power value much better than the fiat I traded for it. How sad is that, really? NFT’s are a total scam, IMO. Who is going to be nostalgic about having a 1:1 fancy image file? Are your friends going to be like “Oh that’s so cool you have a Breedlove fell into a lava pit card. I had that when I was a kid too”? No, your friends aren’t going to say that. This is a major failure of bitcoiners to educate. People who haven’t entered the rabbit whole think that bitcoin holds value because it’s “digital money” (without understanding that >90% of money is digital already and bitcoin’s breakthrough was actually perfecting both decentralized digital scarcity and scarcity in general) and people are getting rich off of other digital monies and the world is “going digital” so this NFT thing is like digital paintings and baseball cards so that must be a thing. It’s stupid.

What are your thoughts on Billionaires like Elon Musk and Michael Saylor getting into Bitcoin?

While powerful billionaires might accelerate bitcoin hype, they probably are a bigger threat to bitcoin than they are a benefit. Bitcoin is safer when it stays under the radar with smaller attack surfaces. I do appreciate a lot of the things Saylor has said but obviously his comments about mining regulation raised some eyebrows. 

Elon really made himself look stupid, made the media look stupid, and made people who follow the media look stupid. How can you buy a car from somebody who speaks with certainty about that which he does not know? I was really looking forward to that cybertruck too. Is it too much to ask for BMW or Ford to make an armored car? I could care less about the electric motor but give me another armored car option for less than 100k please.

How do you feel about Ethereum and the “narrative” that it will flip Bitcoin at some point?

I think we need to move on and let Ethereum people be Ethereum people and just focus on bitcoin. Everything that can be said about why Ethereum is not sound money has been said. If a billionaire, bank, or country wants to invest in a centralized database with many attack surfaces that has been censored and does not have a firm monetary policy or limited supply, then we should let them. The bitcoin community really needs to distinguish itself as separate from the cryptocurrency community. For example the recent Miami bitcoin conference did a poor job of this and invited a bunch of cryptocurrency scammers. They had a lot of good bitcoiners too- but I hope in the future the good bitcoiners will draw a line in the sand and say “I’m not participating in a conference that promotes scams”.

What are your thoughts on ESG mining and where do you think this is headed?

I don’t think about it much. I really hope that the game theoretical nature of bitcoin is that miners who are subjected to regulation that is anti free market will simply relocate to better jurisdictions. I think the only way to really enforce ESG mining is to program that into the bitcoin code. If that were to happen it simply wouldn’t be bitcoin anymore.

What do you think about China banning Bitcoin mining and regulating Bitcoin?

Haha same answer as the ESG stuff. But overall the Chinese ban(s) are probably good for bitcoin. Let’s decentralize this thing. 

Anti bitcoin regulation by countries might prop up their fiat businesses in the short term but will likely make their countries poorer in the long term. Will be very interesting to see how this works out for China.

Will we see other countries including the United States do the same?

I think we will see similar regulatory attacks by other countries and this may include the United States. This has the potential to be bearish for price in the short term. At the same time, enemies of countries that have “banned” bitcoin stand to gain power if they then promote bitcoin. It wouldn’t take a lot of countries promoting bitcoin to have a huge positive effect on the price.

There have been rumors of a digital US dollar? What is your take on this if it happens?

The threat of CBDC’s should accelerate the need for bitcoin because this will introduce the ability to more easily censor transactions, administer wealth taxes, program money expiration, airdrop UBI etc. Fiat only gets worse from here.

Interestingly, If UBI starts getting airdropped, then the banks are cut out of the money spigot. This may force private banks, which have traditionally been powerful enemies of bitcoin, to start promoting bitcoin.

Why do you think some people, especially noobs gravitate to shitcoins?

Bitcoiners have allowed monetary truth seekers to become labeled as toxic maximalists. We don’t penalize scammers’ reputations enough.

There is one other thing that we should fix ASAP. Unit bias is real. Making sats the standard will make bitcoin appear very cheap. This will bring in noobs who otherwise stay away thinking they “missed the boat”. Where your money goes your mind goes. Bringing in noobs thinking they are buying something very cheaply would create a lot of hardened bitcoiners. 

I think the only reason exchanges haven’t changed their bitcoin denominations to sats is that this would make bitcoin much more appealing and they would have a much harder time shilling cheaper-appearing scams to dummies.

What tips can you give them to avoid this trap?

People need to put in some effort. The vast majority of people out there won’t take a few hours and read The Bitcoin Standard and they really don’t deserve to avoid the shitcoin traps. There’s only so much friends like you and I can say to them. But for fuck’s sake, people spend most of their waking hours earning tokens with which to store their finite time on this earth. They need to take a little time and learn how those tokens work.

Who are some of the most hardcore Bitcoiners you know and why?

Well, you are a legend with your Medium and Hacker Noon articles and the legendary Bear Market Diaries. It really is hardcore to keep producing during bear markets LOL. You are also one of the few that isn’t afraid to tell influencers where to shove it when they are acting stupid.

Goon_34 is hardcore because he is a genius who really goes out of his way to help dummies like me with technical issues. 

Coinicarus and Nico are hardcore because they produce more content then anybody and it’s all pure signal. They tell it like it is. 

Selfbankt probably produces my favorite bitcoin graphics out there and he is surviving living in the UK which makes him a double badass. 

Much respect to Citadel21 for all of their efforts for bitcoin education.

What Bitcoin startups or companies are you most excited about?

This is not a strong area for me. I’m really happy with my Fold card but am hopeful they improve the product to be a full fledged credit card and they add a competitive standard bitcoin reward for purchases to make every day use more practical. The way it works now is you have to buy gift cards to get a decent reward and there are only a few gift cards offered that I use. Fortunately one of those is Amazon, but they are often out of stock.

I know the community is often suspicious about Blockstream and I don’t necessarily agree 100% with everything that they say or do, but I think it’s time for the community to give them some credit for all of their contributions and get behind their ideas and products more. I think they have demonstrated that they are good actors in general. Of course, trust nobody 100%.

What are your goto Bitcoin storage options?

I don’t want to get specific, but I use hardware wallets and I don’t use Ledger, because they suck and can’t even keep our addresses safe.

Name some of your favorite information sources and/or podcasts in the space.

My recent rotation has been:

Fun with Bitcoin

Simply Bitcoin

The Bitcoin Standard podcast

Bitcoin Audible

Bitcoin And...

Any last words of wisdom?

I think that normies need to wake up and think about money more. I don’t think it’s an accident that we were taught “money isn’t everything” and “money is complicated so leave it to the experts to think about”. Money is your time and freedom. You need to be thinking about it. You should take an hour every day and think about it, because if you don’t you will be taking more time than that trying to make it. Tell your kids to think about money. 

Don’t trust the media.

Take care of yourself mentally and physically - because if we are right about this thing then we will have more to live for.