Latest / What Bitcoin Did / The State of Bitcoin Adoption | Troy Cross & Ella Hough

Transcript

The State of Bitcoin Adoption | Troy Cross & Ella Hough · What Bitcoin Did

• 0:00
  Bitcoin solves the problem of how to communicate truth, trust, value and meaning across time
• 0:10
  spacing culture, verifiably and without coercion or intermediaries.
• 0:15
  Bitcoin allows for consensus without rulers and re-architecting trust and inviting a future
• 0:21
  where power structures as they've been could start to shift.
• 0:25
  The Bitcoin standard tells you truths about supply and demand because it can't lie in the way that fiat can lie by shifting supply.
• 0:34
  Bitcoin is here to stay. It has a very large constituency in the US. It's not going away and it's a force to be reckoned with.
• 0:45
  One of the things that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage.
• 0:50
  This is where AnchorWatch comes in.
• 0:51
  With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy,
• 0:57
  and all Bitcoin is held in their time-locked multi-sig bolts.
• 1:00
  So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin is fully insured while not giving up custody.
• 1:04
  So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own mistakes,
• 1:09
  you're fully protected by Anchor Watch.
• 1:11
  Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US.
• 1:18
  speak to anchor watch today for a quote and for more details about your security options and
• 1:22
  coverage visit anchor watch.com today that is anchor watch.com do you wish you could access
• 1:28
  cash without selling your bitcoin well ledden makes that possible ledden are the global leader
• 1:33
  in bitcoin-backed lending and since 2018 they've issued over nine billion dollars in loans with a
• 1:37
  perfect record of protecting client assets with ledden you get full custody loans with no credit
• 1:42
  checks no monthly repayments just easy access to dollars without selling a single sat
• 1:47
  As of July 1st, Ledin is Bitcoin only, meaning they exclusively offer Bitcoin-backed loans
• 1:52
  with all collateral held by Ledin directly or their funding partners.
• 1:56
  Your Bitcoin is never lent out to generate interest.
• 1:58
  I recently took out a loan with Ledin and the whole process couldn't have been easier.
• 2:02
  It took me less than 15 minutes to go through the application
• 2:04
  and in just a few hours I had the dollars in my account.
• 2:07
  It was super smooth.
• 2:08
  So if you need cash but you don't want to sell Bitcoin,
• 2:10
  head over to ledin.io forward slash WBD and you'll get 25% off your first loan.
• 2:16
  That's L-E-D-N dot I-O forward slash W-B-D
• 2:20
  Bitcoin is absolutely ripping and in every bull market there's always a new wave of investors
• 2:25
  and with it a flood of new companies, new products and new promises.
• 2:28
  But if you've been around long enough you've seen how this story ends for a lot of them.
• 2:32
  Some cut corners, take risks with your money or just disappear.
• 2:35
  That's why when it comes to buying Bitcoin the only exchange I recommend is River.
• 2:39
  They deeply care about doing things right for their clients
• 2:41
  and are built to last with security and transparency at their core.
• 2:45
  With River, you have peace of mind knowing all their Bitcoin is held in multi-sig cold storage,
• 2:49
  and it's the only Bitcoin-only exchange in the US with proof of reserves.
• 2:53
  There really is no better place to buy Bitcoin.
• 2:55
  So to open an account today, head over to river.com forward slash WBD
• 2:59
  and earn up to $100 in Bitcoin when you buy.
• 3:02
  That's river.com forward slash WBD.
• 3:05
  Troy, thank you for coming back on the show.
• 3:08
  I'm slightly embarrassed it's taken me this long to get you on the new show,
• 3:11
  but thank you for coming on.
• 3:12
  And Ella, welcome.
• 3:14
  Awesome. First time on What Bitcoin Did. I see you at all the conferences there with your mom in the
• 3:19
  front row taking notes, being a good Bitcoiner. But do you want to start with a bit of an
• 3:24
  introduction? Tell everyone who you are. Yes, thank you, Danny. My name is Ella Huff. I am
• 3:29
  the co-founder of the Bitcoin Students Network, which works with Gen Z all around the world. Now
• 3:34
  we're up to about 70 countries on just becoming more active in the Bitcoin space. And I'm also
• 3:40
  a junior fellow at the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, where we are doing the first
• 3:46
  large-scale global Bitcoin adoption study. And I recently graduated from Cornell,
• 3:52
  where I got to study Bitcoin officially, and was very grateful to have Troy on my committee.
• 3:59
  Very cool. And so we're going to get into all the adoption work, because Troy,
• 4:02
  with the Nakamoto Project, you've just done another report. But before we do that,
• 4:07
  Can we talk about your senior thesis?
• 4:09
  Explain to everyone what it was, because this sounds really interesting.
• 4:12
  Thank you.
• 4:13
  Yes.
• 4:13
  So my thesis was titled Bitcoin, the language for discovering, speaking, settling and preserving truth.
• 4:23
  And I wrote this for the Robert S. Harrison College Scholar major program.
• 4:29
  And so it's an independent major program where you apply with a question that you can't study in any other established major on campus.
• 4:39
  And as a part of that, you get to choose all of your courses.
• 4:43
  And for your senior thesis, you get to choose your committee of advisors who are on it and the topic.
• 4:51
  And you just kind of have a year to go for it.
• 4:53
  And in May, you defend it.
• 4:55
  And then you get to choose the title that appears on your transcript for what you studied. And so for me, I submitted Bitcoin and it was approved. So now that is on my transcript. And I should preface that I'm not great at writing concisely. And this turned into a about 350 page thesis.
• 5:15
  Yes, that actually two months ago to the day that we're recording, I turned into the library and I haven't quite figured out the best package to share it out with everyone, but I will eventually.
• 5:31
  But I argue that Bitcoin solves the problem of how to communicate truth, trust, value and meaning across time, space and culture verifiably and without coercion or intermediaries.
• 5:45
  And I would, there's a lot kind of packed into all this, but I think if someone only remembers one thing that I were to say about my thesis, it would be that languages can be really impactful frameworks, vessels, kind of protocols on the dynamics of how our world works and how we perceive our world.
• 6:07
  especially I discovered when there is an economic component to it. And so I, you know, argue Bitcoin
• 6:15
  as maybe the first or better language than others. Troy really helped me with this nuance of what I
• 6:22
  was claiming throughout my thesis at being a language for discovering truth, speaking truth,
• 6:29
  settling truth, preserving truth, and kind of the best or better protocol we have for navigating
• 6:36
  the unknown and what lies in the future. And so I, throughout it, try really hard to not take
• 6:43
  anything for granted. There are a lot of tables and charts kind of helping guide the reader along
• 6:49
  and how I was thinking and how I was reaching conclusions. And it's certainly not the final
• 6:55
  word on any of this, but perhaps just the beginning of a discussion of Bitcoin as a language.
• 7:01
  Amazing. So we're not going to be able to get into the entire 350 pages of this today. But what do you mean when you say Bitcoin as a language, like help people understand what you're trying to say there?
• 7:11
  Yeah, because it's, you know, full transparency for me. I think it's the product of like six years of work, but I perhaps embarrassingly wrote it in about two months as I saw all the pieces come together and really try to provide some essence and deep thought into what do I mean when Bitcoin is a language.
• 7:33
  And so I structured it in five epochs, all with different blocks. And so the second epoch was kind of the first third of the thesis statement. And I describe how Bitcoin is structurally and functionally.
• 7:51
  So I actually go into the definitions of what is money, what is language, and try to define Bitcoin in those frameworks and show how it's the first performative meaning action, not just kind of static and non-extractive language.
• 8:08
  And so often in translation, when let's say you're going from Mandarin or English, you lose value, you lose meaning in that. So Bitcoin's the first language that's non-extractive.
• 8:21
  that every human, no matter where you're from, can speak and that embodies five different types
• 8:29
  of capital that I go into and ultimately allows you to instantly and verifiably and 100% error
• 8:37
  free and a trustless manner, established truth. So that's kind of the first third.
• 8:43
  But then after you get away from- That's 100 pages, Dani.
• 8:46
  after you get away from some of that then I get into okay what does this do for our world how does
• 8:55
  this shift power structures and so where this came from and this is why I give Troy a lot of
• 9:01
  credit for how this shaped or helped me think about it it's because I thought oh this is kind
• 9:06
  of crazy not so right but Troy encouraged me to dive in and keep thinking and keep pursuing
• 9:12
  Often we hear about Bitcoin as the separation of money and state.
• 9:17
  And I'm sure many people are familiar with kind of the number symbolism of the separation of church and state with Martin Luther and the publication of the White Paper on October 31st.
• 9:28
  But when I was reading, I discovered that often there is a real tie between linguistic and economic dominance and how there's this tension that comes up with the want to be present and vocal in the global world, but having to sacrifice your culture and your identity.
• 9:50
  And so this kind of next part talks about how Bitcoin allows for consensus without rulers and re-architecting trust and inviting a future where power structures as they've been could start to shift.
• 10:06
  Actually, just before we get on to the final part, I want to ask you a question about that.
• 10:09
  So you're arguing in this that English-speaking countries retain economic dominance because they're English-speaking?
• 10:17
  So a little bit different.
• 10:19
  So I'm saying economic dominance often sustains linguistic dominance.
• 10:26
  And so Nigeria has more than 500 languages, but English is the official language.
• 10:34
  And if you look at the education of all of the world leaders today, the majority have
• 10:40
  come from or been educated in an English speaking institution.
• 10:44
  And so I am saying how, okay, if you all of a sudden maybe have a world where this economic dominance is neutral, anyone can partake in it, it's not controlled by rulers, then is there a world where we can really see a revival of culture and freedom and human flourishing in that sense?
• 11:06
  Amazing.
• 11:07
  I need to read the full 350 pages of this.
• 11:10
  I'll send it to you.
• 11:11
  But again, I try to not take things for granted. And so I actually go into some network theory and, you know, cognitive influences on adoption and there's game theory. And so I try to take a lot of what I've learned in classes and use that or just some of those frameworks. So it's not just me thinking or overly biasing where it goes.
• 11:35
  Have you thought about turning this into a book?
• 11:38
  Yes.
• 11:38
  I have.
• 11:40
  You need to do it.
• 11:41
  Yeah.
• 11:42
  I look at it and there's holes that I see in it, but I need to figure out how to properly
• 11:48
  package it.
• 11:49
  If I can say just a few words about Ella's thesis.
• 11:53
  Please do.
• 11:54
  First of all, I've already gotten too much credit here today.
• 11:56
  I was just an outside advisor who just threw cold water on some things early on.
• 12:03
  But Ella's done a tremendous amount of work here.
• 12:07
  My biggest takeaway was, oh, my God, Ella is a workhorse.
• 12:13
  I just couldn't believe I was watching her Twitter and seeing her like travel schedule and everything.
• 12:19
  And I also knew what she had done and what she had yet to do.
• 12:24
  And the pages just kept keep cranking out at an extraordinary rate.
• 12:29
  I know Ella has a job already and already a bright future in Bitcoin.
• 12:32
  But my takeaway was like, oh, my God, she's an amazing, has an amazing work ethic.
• 12:40
  And I wanted to know how she manages her time and is able to get so much stuff done.
• 12:46
  That was my number one takeaway.
• 12:48
  No, going back to the thesis, I think it's really noteworthy for its originality.
• 12:54
  There's original thoughts throughout this thesis that are 100 percent Ella's.
• 12:59
  She's read like the entire Bitcoin corpus from the Bitcoin side.
• 13:02
  And this is a bit of the problem in how to package it. Could she publish the book? Yes, she could publish the thesis pretty much as is. And it would be an absolute bestseller on the Bitcoin side of things. It's full of bangers. It's like full of bangers throughout the whole book. Interesting thoughts. Well, well put.
• 13:22
  But in terms of like aiming at an academic audience that's outside, those people are going to want something more focused and in-depth.
• 13:31
  And just like the thesis itself, I mean, the major, it's hard to know where to put it.
• 13:37
  It's really the kind of thesis that only could have been written in the format that she wrote it because it draws on so many different disciplines.
• 13:46
  and so another thing she could do with it is take the best chunks out of it and go deeper into the
• 13:52
  relevant academic literature and do that i mean could do both could could uh yeah condense it a
• 13:59
  little bit take the greatest hits for bitcoiners and write a popular book and it would you know it
• 14:04
  would sell very well and and then could pick one or two of the philosophical or academic ideas and
• 14:10
  go deep with them uh i mean i think i think uh one of the things that the thesis got me thinking about
• 14:16
  was that a language could have an orientation towards truth.
• 14:21
  You know, Bitcoin is a, it's many things,
• 14:24
  but Ella makes the case at length that it is a language
• 14:28
  in more than just the sense that it's a simple system
• 14:31
  or it allows for the transmission of information.
• 14:34
  But it's a language in that it's performative
• 14:36
  and that it's involved with our lives in ways that languages are.
• 14:41
  But most languages are, I mean, all languages are neutral
• 14:44
  with respect to what is true.
• 14:45
  You can say falsehoods as well as you can say truths. Bitcoin, for a select set of propositions that you can express in that language, doesn't allow you to speak falsehoods because the map is the territory, as Gigi would put it.
• 15:04
  When the map is the territory, the map can't lie about the territory. And if the territory is transactions in Bitcoin and the history of transactions, then it can't lie. And there are other ways that Bitcoin is connected to the truth beyond that sort of most obvious way.
• 15:19
  You know, the Bitcoin record tells you truths about thermodynamics, like how much energy has been expended in the pursuit of in the pursuit of blocks.
• 15:28
  It tells you in the kind of Jeff Booth sense, the Bitcoin standard tells you truths about supply and demand in the prices that are priced in Bitcoin.
• 15:42
  Because it can't lie in the way that fiat can lie by shifting supply.
• 15:46
  So there are kind of multiple dimensions along which Bitcoin is truth-related as a technology and as a language.
• 15:55
  And that's really interesting that a language could be oriented towards truth, even for some subset of things.
• 16:02
  Not at all obvious and a really interesting point.
• 16:05
  I think this sounds absolutely fascinating.
• 16:07
  Ella, will you send me a copy of this?
• 16:09
  And I think we should do a full show on just this thesis.
• 16:12
  But we are here to talk about adoption today.
• 16:16
  Um, so Troy, you've obviously just dropped a, the latest report from the Nakamoto Institute,
• 16:21
  uh, not Nakamoto Institute, what's it called?
• 16:24
  Nakamoto Project.
• 16:24
  Nakamoto Project.
• 16:25
  Unfortunately, just almost exactly the same label as Nakamoto Institute.
• 16:30
  And Ella, you're working on something at Cornell.
• 16:33
  So why don't we start with you, Troy?
• 16:34
  Do you want to start with the slides and we'll work through some of the stuff?
• 16:37
  Sure.
• 16:38
  Yeah.
• 16:38
  Let me share here.
• 16:40
  Maybe Danny, while Troy's pulling them up, I just want to give a shout out to my other
• 16:44
  two thesis advisors, Sarah Kreps, who I'm working on the study with. And then my third advisor is
• 16:50
  Kaushik Basu, who is the former chief economic advisor to India. So I was so grateful to have
• 16:57
  him on board. That's very cool. Thanks to both of them too.
• 17:02
  So Troy, why don't you start with explaining the first survey you did and kind of what the idea
• 17:08
  behind this project is? Yeah. First of all, last year we did the largest at that time,
• 17:12
  comprehensive survey of Bitcoin adoption and attitudes in the US. We surveyed 3,538 people
• 17:21
  with a professional survey company to get a representative sample. And I think I talked
• 17:26
  about this with you and Peter in one of your last shows recorded. And the big upshot was
• 17:33
  that Bitcoin owners look pretty much just like Americans, except they're younger and they're male.
• 17:39
  and politically at that time they were neither left nor right but just matched the broader
• 17:46
  population pretty much exactly that was the most surprising part in the original one is that it was
• 17:53
  it yeah it was in fact it may have even skewed to like the far left in some in some areas yeah we
• 18:00
  what we had last year was it looked pretty much like america except the the high the single group
• 18:05
  that was most likely to own Bitcoin
• 18:08
  was very liberal on the left-right spectrum.
• 18:13
  And that's not to say most Bitcoiners are very liberal.
• 18:15
  That's to say among the very liberal people who are there,
• 18:19
  a higher percentage of them own Bitcoin
• 18:21
  than a percentage of moderates or whatever.
• 18:23
  The very far right was also overrepresented
• 18:26
  relative to the population.
• 18:27
  So we had just like slightly higher tips on the curve,
• 18:32
  but mostly it looked just like the curve
• 18:34
  And it didn't go left or right overall when he just looked at the average as it was dead center. That was our big surprising result. Nobody really believed us. Or as you say, very few people believed us. Nobody believed us on Noster, where everybody told me like, no, you're using the wrong scale because it's left right. And it's not libertarian authoritarian, like for the political compass.
• 18:57
  But we did ask a question about libertarianism. And 5% of our sample of Bitcoin owners said they were libertarian. And that was a much higher percentage than the libertarians in the population. But it still only represents 1 in 20 people who hold Bitcoin.
• 19:15
  So this year we ran the survey again.
• 19:18
  We ran it with the same exact number of participants,
• 19:23
  not that we were aiming for that exact number,
• 19:25
  we got the exact same number of participants.
• 19:27
  We used the same polling company.
• 19:29
  We ensured that none of the participants were the same.
• 19:32
  So we weren getting the same person from last year at all all new people And it took us about a month actually the whole month of March to collect this data because you know we giving people a small monetary reward for taking the sample
• 19:48
  And the first kind of people to sign up for these things tend to be elderly. You know,
• 19:53
  they're not employed. They're not high income, high education. They're just like looking for
• 20:00
  ways to make a little bit of money. So we very quickly filled up our senior citizens, and then
• 20:05
  we had to work really hard to get young people college educated in that kind of range. So we did
• 20:12
  a lot of work to gather a representative sample, and of course no sample is perfect. We're really
• 20:17
  proud of this one geographically, in terms of gender distribution, ethnic composition, educational
• 20:22
  attainment, income, and other markers we tried as hard as we could to match the U.S. census.
• 20:27
  something to bear in mind so i think we did talk about this last time you're on the show but the
• 20:34
  big question i have here which you kind of touched on then is how do you make sure you get the right
• 20:38
  people in the study because if you're offering i don't know what you offer these people in terms of
• 20:42
  a monetary incentive to actually fill out this survey but i assume it's harder to get people
• 20:47
  earning like 100k plus a year than it is to get low-income people it is it is it took us like the
• 20:54
  entire month of March to gather this sample. We didn't do it ourselves. Some people who
• 20:59
  questioned our results said that we got our sample from Coinbase or we got our sample from
• 21:04
  the Bitcoin Magazine subscribers. And those are the sorts of critiques we got.
• 21:10
  We also got a lot of people saying, if I were to ask 50 people at Walmart or 50 people at Home
• 21:17
  Depot whether they own Bitcoin, I guarantee you I would get a different result from you guys.
• 21:23
  And yeah, that's because representative sampling is hard.
• 21:28
  This is why we hired a professional company to do it.
• 21:32
  Yeah, we give a monetary reward for taking the sample.
• 21:36
  But also in order to qualify to the sample, you have to fit certain demographic criteria.
• 21:41
  And we filled up on the unemployed older people right away.
• 21:45
  And we had to work hard to get our younger part of our sample.
• 21:49
  And that's increasingly an issue for online surveys.
• 21:52
  I mean, I don't like filling out online surveys myself.
• 21:56
  We also did attention checks throughout the process of the survey.
• 22:02
  So if people weren't really paying attention, but just filling things in, we toss the results.
• 22:07
  So these are people who at least paid attention enough to pass through the checks.
• 22:13
  And in fact, the survey data matched very closely a lot of things from last year and what we expected across different questions.
• 22:21
  So we think it's a really good sample. We're very proud of the sample itself.
• 22:27
  And then the other question on that, which is, when you say this is a Bitcoin sample,
• 22:33
  how do you make sure they know what Bitcoin actually is and they're not talking about crypto?
• 22:37
  We actually did it twice in the report itself. We started off by saying this is a survey about
• 22:45
  Bitcoin ownership and not any other kind of cryptocurrency like Ether or Solana or Ripple
• 22:50
  or whatever. And then later on, when we ask a specific question about, do you own Bitcoin?
• 22:56
  We also said, bearing in mind that the survey is not about any other kind of cryptocurrency other
• 23:01
  than Bitcoin. Do you own Bitcoin? Because we were sensitive that last year, even though we had that
• 23:06
  disclaimer at the beginning of the survey last year, we were sensitive that they had kind of
• 23:11
  forgotten it by the time they got to this, do you own Bitcoin questions? We still think some of them
• 23:17
  might have forgotten it or still might not recognize it. It's Andy, my co-author, Andy
• 23:23
  Perkins was saying Bitcoin is the Kleenex of cryptocurrencies. The name for the brand has
• 23:30
  become the name for the segment. And that makes Griff, that makes affinity scamming very easy.
• 23:38
  You know, the Kleenex executives are probably really pissed off when people buy puffs and say,
• 23:43
  yes, I got some Kleenex when you had Kleenex on the to buy list, right? And the same goes for
• 23:48
  Kodak or Xerox or any of these other kind of market leaders. It's the blessing and the curse
• 23:54
  of being the segment leader that people just associate you with the whole segment. In some
• 24:00
  ways, that's brand dominance, but in other ways, it sucks. But we did our very best to kind of
• 24:08
  pare that down. And it might explain the difference between our numbers and some numbers that are even
• 24:12
  higher than ours. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time?
• 24:17
  Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware, you can. New tax guidelines from the Big Beautiful Bill
• 24:22
  allow American miners to write off 100% of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year.
• 24:27
  That's right, 100% write-off. If you have 100k in capital gains or income, you can purchase 100k
• 24:33
  of miners and offset it entirely. Blockware's mining as a service enables you to start mining
• 24:38
  Bitcoin right now without lifting a finger. Blockware handles everything from securing
• 24:42
  the miners to sourcing low-cost power to configuring the mining pool, they do it all.
• 24:47
  You get to stack Bitcoin at a discount every single day while also saving big come tax season.
• 24:52
  Get started today by going to mining.blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD and for every hosted miner
• 24:59
  purchased you get one week of free hosting and electricity. Of course none of this is tax advice,
• 25:03
  speak with Blockware to learn more at mining.blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD.
• 25:09
  This episode is brought to you by the massive legends, Iron, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin
• 25:14
  miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network, they're also
• 25:19
  providing cutting edge computing resources for AI all backed by renewable energy. We've been working
• 25:24
  with our founders Dan and Will for quite some time now and have been really impressed with their
• 25:27
  values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power.
• 25:31
  So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power,
• 25:35
  IREN is setting the standard.
• 25:37
  Visit iren.com to learn more, which is I-R-E-N dot com.
• 25:41
  If you're already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets,
• 25:44
  complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen, or forgotten.
• 25:50
  Well, BitKey fixes that.
• 25:51
  BitKey is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App.
• 25:56
  It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature
• 25:59
  into an intuitive, easy to use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. It's simple,
• 26:05
  secure self-custody without the stress. And time named BitKey one of the best inventions of 2024.
• 26:10
  Get 20% off at bitkey.world when you use code WBD. That's B-I-T-K-E-Y.world and use code WBD.
• 26:19
  Okay, cool. So let's get into it. So what's changed since last time you did this?
• 26:22
  Okay, good. Well, first of all, yeah, we introduced a new method of,
• 26:28
  a new way of testing for Bitcoin ownership, because we also got a critique last year. Last
• 26:34
  year, we found one in seven or 13% of people said they owned Bitcoin. And we just asked that simple
• 26:41
  question, do you own Bitcoin? And we got a lot of people saying, well, maybe more own it than that,
• 26:46
  but they own it in ways that they're not going to say yes to that question. Like their spouse owns
• 26:51
  it and they own everything jointly with their spouse, but they're not going to answer yet.
• 26:56
  Yes, or maybe they have it through an ETF. So this time we asked an open-ended question,
• 27:01
  do you own Bitcoin? And then we'd say on exchanges, in self-custody, in an ETF,
• 27:09
  jointly with a partner, through a business investment, and click all that apply or check
• 27:14
  all that apply. And then we also had an option that said none of these ways. And so there we
• 27:21
  found 18.6% ownership of Bitcoin, which is between one in five and one in six, which is 48 million
• 27:31
  Americans. I looked up a Pew research study on Catholics in America, and there's supposedly 50
• 27:38
  million Catholics. They're probably also counting kids. So roughly Bitcoin owners equals Catholics
• 27:45
  in terms of population in the US.
• 27:49
  Yeah, that is formidable political constituency.
• 27:55
  That's very interesting.
• 27:56
  And when you, like, I can obviously see this here
• 27:58
  on the ownership, exchanges dominating
• 28:00
  by quite a long way, which is probably not surprising.
• 28:04
  Self-custody, relatively high, 23%.
• 28:07
  The ETF thing's interesting,
• 28:09
  because that's obviously, I don't even know
• 28:11
  if that was around when you did the last report.
• 28:13
  It was around, but just barely.
• 28:15
  But that's already at 20%.
• 28:17
  ETF share is almost equal to self-custody.
• 28:21
  Probably next year, it'll be in the second position behind exchanges.
• 28:26
  Was there anything in here that surprised you?
• 28:29
  Yeah.
• 28:29
  Self-custody, you mentioned it's 22% of Bitcoin owners, that roughly one in five owners holds
• 28:37
  in self-custody.
• 28:38
  but what's really shocking is that's 4.1 percent of the whole population or 11 million american
• 28:45
  adults and this one uh honestly made me question our data because i thought it just couldn't be
• 28:51
  true i thought it was just too high and i was like oh no like does this doom the whole survey
• 28:57
  and i looked up um i looked up hardware wallet sales uh ledger sold 8 million wallets uh
• 29:04
  Cumulatively, globally, Trezor has sold 2 million.
• 29:11
  You know, those dominate the numbers for hardware wallets.
• 29:15
  So if every one of those wallets was still in use and all belonged to exactly one American each,
• 29:21
  then, you know, that would accommodate our 11 million, roughly.
• 29:25
  But we know that's not the case.
• 29:28
  And, you know, probably it's more like 1 million out of that 11 million that holds on a hardware wallet.
• 29:34
  So other possibilities, you know, maybe people just don't understand what self-custody means. We tried to explain it in the question. But another possibility is that they hold them on mobile wallets where you write down your keys. And we looked at downloads of popular mobile wallets and Trust Wallet is 200 million downloads.
• 29:58
  And it's also a garbage wallet. So if anyone's listening and uses it, do not use it.
• 30:02
  it's a garbage early wallet that came out of the Binance ecosystem.
• 30:07
  But Binance is huge in everything, and it's in first place by a lot.
• 30:13
  So my theory on this is that the 4.21% self-custody number represents the blessing of crypto.
• 30:24
  Because I think a lot of people downloaded these wallets because it's a lot easier and cheaper.
• 30:28
  it's free cheaper than buying a hardware wallet and they probably a lot of people bought these
• 30:35
  wallets in order to hold their nfts and play games on defi yield farm and that sort of thing in the
• 30:42
  last cycle and then you know as all that stuff crashes they move into bitcoin or maybe wrapped
• 30:48
  bitcoin because it's the safest and best um crypto asset so i think a lot of people are doing self
• 30:56
  custody because they came in through the crypto route and it's less just less of a big hurdle to
• 31:02
  have a mobile wallet like that but yeah that's a huge constituency 11 million people who do this
• 31:08
  thing that elizabeth warren and others have characterized as shadowy super code or behavior
• 31:12
  like no that's a lot of that's a lot of americans right now the roman storm trial is going on
• 31:18
  you know the the issues the three bills that are before congress and debating about whether to be
• 31:24
  bundled, whether to provide developers immunity from charges that have to do with how their
• 31:33
  software is used.
• 31:35
  Like, who cares about those issues?
• 31:37
  I think this 11 million, they're a serious, passionate constituency of the electorate.
• 31:43
  Totally.
• 31:44
  It would be interesting.
• 31:45
  I don't know if you could do this.
• 31:46
  Maybe people wouldn't want to share this data, but it would be interesting if you could kind
• 31:49
  of weight that by how much Bitcoin they actually own and see how that changed the scale.
• 31:56
  Absolutely. And I think this is a big kind of flaw in our study overall is that what we're
• 32:01
  talking about is whether you own Bitcoin, not how much you own. And a lot of our results that
• 32:06
  shock people, I think, is that people's opinions are weighted by the whales that they know.
• 32:12
  and um you know i don't know how much money is on the typical cash app wallet but my guess is it's
• 32:20
  not a lot so you might have 20 on your cash app and you might have 10 in bitcoin and you're going
• 32:28
  to show up as a yes in this survey i would imagine if if you did weight it by how much bitcoin they
• 32:33
  were going to own it'd be really interesting to see what went i assume self-custody would be higher
• 32:37
  you'd hope so um but maybe things like the etf would also be much higher um ella does this i i
• 32:44
  know your survey you did was on a global scale but does this data match up with what you're seeing
• 32:49
  yeah it tracks very closely um and i can show you if that's helpful to charts if we want to
• 32:57
  switch over but um troy we have similar numbers on self-custody it's about like 14 15 million
• 33:03
  americans um similarly on ownership we got 49 um million americans very close so they're really
• 33:12
  close to what you found wow that is that's i mean that must be a a bit of a blessing to see that
• 33:19
  the data is actually pretty similar because otherwise i don't know who would be wrong
• 33:22
  but so ella let's let's go through your slides after we'll keep going through troy's first so
• 33:27
  should we move on to the next one i'll march us along i'll march us along take your time on uh on
• 33:32
  gender and age, we found the same thing as last year. Bitcoin is a young male phenomenon.
• 33:38
  And like I said last year, if we want to cross the chasm of adoption, eventually,
• 33:45
  women need to use Bitcoin as well as men. And also, you know, we need to get the old zin on it
• 33:52
  eventually at some point. Do you know what, just quickly before we move on from that,
• 33:56
  the interesting thing there is if I compare that to the audience on the podcast,
• 34:00
  it's actually quite different um good so when i was in austin i was me and marty were both judges
• 34:07
  on this um on the pleb lab builder day thing and we were talking about this because one of the um
• 34:13
  projects that was being pitched was a sort of mobile game app that was trying to get younger
• 34:17
  people into bitcoin and we were both saying that like our podcast numbers aren't it's not young
• 34:22
  people like the gen z is a very very small percentage of who listens to this podcast
• 34:27
  and maybe that's to do with it being long form and like to stereotype gen z they have a short
• 34:32
  attention span but um my podcast audience gets older not younger which i think is quite interesting
• 34:38
  and maybe conflicts with this data a little bit well um i i think you're i think that's right
• 34:45
  and even last year are under 25 you'll notice a slight drop off from 26 to 30
• 34:51
  and 31 to 35, those are the highest.
• 34:55
  Under 25, it drops off a bit.
• 34:57
  If you look on the female side last year,
• 34:59
  the drop off at under 25 was a little more dramatic.
• 35:02
  And these are smaller samples
• 35:03
  within these like five year range.
• 35:05
  So my confidence intervals are much wider.
• 35:08
  I think 18 to 25 is an area we need to work on.
• 35:13
  Yeah.
• 35:13
  I think it's an area we need to work on.
• 35:15
  Also, I just talked to my students about it
• 35:17
  and none of them are interested in Bitcoin.
• 35:19
  They might be interested in some kind of shitcoin technology or nothing, but they view it as
• 35:26
  something where the train already left the station by the time they came along.
• 35:29
  And, you know, they sort of see it as boomer coin.
• 35:33
  And so I think we need to work on that demographic.
• 35:35
  It's key moving forward.
• 35:37
  Well, hey, we got Ella here.
• 35:39
  I know.
• 35:39
  Yeah.
• 35:39
  I don't know why I was old.
• 35:40
  I don't know why I'm even talking here.
• 35:42
  But I do think there's an interesting thing there.
• 35:44
  Like when I found Bitcoin, I was in my mid 20s.
• 35:46
  But Bitcoin was, I mean, I had very little money, but Bitcoin was a lot cheaper then.
• 35:51
  And so it made more sense.
• 35:52
  But if you're in your like early mid 20s now and you're looking at Bitcoin at 120K, like
• 35:56
  that seems like a something that's maybe out of reach.
• 35:59
  But Ella, you should probably talk on this.
• 36:01
  What do Gen Z think of Bitcoin?
• 36:04
  I think it's mixed and I think it's really mixed around the world.
• 36:07
  I mean, in especially because this study, it's global.
• 36:11
  Like there's only three countries where it's really high outliers on the older age ranges.
• 36:18
  And that is, I believe, Kenya, Nigeria, and El Salvador.
• 36:22
  All of the other countries, it's not like that when you get to the older age ranges.
• 36:27
  And I think I have had success introducing the concept of stats and satoshis to younger,
• 36:35
  you know gen z just the same way we have cents and a dollar you know showing how it is achievable
• 36:41
  and there are still ways for you to you know get into this space and i'll just say really quickly
• 36:48
  i think a key conversation that's often not had in colleges in just discussions when you're growing
• 36:54
  up and thinking about the future is really you know what are we even all here for what are we
• 36:59
  trying to accomplish. For me, Bitcoin resonated because essentially from age 13, when I was
• 37:06
  thinking about my future, how am I going to take care of myself? What am I going to do?
• 37:10
  I essentially had to plan for when I was going to die, not to be dramatic.
• 37:15
  You were thinking about this at 13 hours?
• 37:18
  Yes. And then when I found Bitcoin, it was literally like the flip of a light switch. Oh,
• 37:24
  now there is this tool that I can use to help me plan for life and what gives me joy and meaning.
• 37:32
  And I think that's a message that's also not really translated or told to younger people about
• 37:37
  what is Bitcoin going to do for your life and what impact can it have?
• 37:42
  That's, I mean, I was definitely not thinking about these huge existential questions when I
• 37:46
  was 13. I was thinking about football. But it is interesting because like on the older side,
• 37:52
  I imagine that I can see how that grows with the kind of financialization, monetization of Bitcoin, all these like ETF products.
• 38:00
  I can see how that grows.
• 38:01
  I think the younger side is actually going to be harder to grow going forward.
• 38:05
  I agree, Danny.
• 38:06
  And I think what Ella said is so, so beautiful and appealing.
• 38:12
  Our kids don't have a lot of things that make them hopeful.
• 38:15
  They don't have a lot of they don't see a future for themselves.
• 38:19
  and um what they've been told about bitcoin definitely doesn't help them see a future uh
• 38:28
  from from the media or from you know the the elites that are guiding them uh in education
• 38:35
  they've been told that bitcoin is like other extractive technologies like um it's going to
• 38:42
  it's going to take from the poor and give to the rich it's going to destroy the environment that
• 38:48
  they live in, and it's going to inhibit the ability of government to operate and work.
• 38:54
  So they don't really see it as hope. And that's where we have a massive educational task in front
• 39:00
  of us. Yeah, totally. Because you can flip all of those narratives on the head. And that is why
• 39:05
  Bitcoin is hope. Absolutely. And it's hope for a much simpler reason that the number is still going
• 39:12
  up and has a long way to go And you don have to have one Bitcoin The unit bias thing is extreme You know we make fun of it in Bitcoin but I don buy Berkshire Hathaway stock by the fraction you know because it just such an
• 39:26
  expensive stock. I don't own Berkshire Hathaway. And there's no rational reason for me not to buy
• 39:32
  a fraction of a share. You can do that. But I still look at it like it's some kind of luxury
• 39:39
  thing and that ship kind of sailed and it would have been nice to be, you know, Buffett's friend
• 39:43
  30 years ago. But I think for like, like, like Ella said, sats is is good. I've heard other
• 39:53
  proposals, you know, making bits the standard and just like listing the price of Bitcoin with bits.
• 39:59
  I know there's an effort in the industry to do that. I think something like that might be really
• 40:04
  helpful for for Gen Z. Actually, I like bits and sats. I think they can both work. What I don't
• 40:09
  Mike is calling sats Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. It's just too confusing.
• 40:17
  Something that in Brent Buchanan's study, signal study, I presented with this guy in DC,
• 40:23
  they did 800 people, likely voters. They had a like, why don't you own Bitcoin question?
• 40:29
  And I consulted with them before they offered up the alternatives there. And I was like, well,
• 40:35
  one of the alternatives should be, I don't have enough money. I don't have the funds to do it.
• 40:39
  And sure enough, like that was one of the highest ranking answers, right? People just, I don't have enough money to do it. And I think it was like 25% or 30% of people who don't have Bitcoin just said, that's the reason. And yeah, if you have, um, if it's a dollar a Bitcoin or 10 cents a Bitcoin on the way to a dollar, uh, sorry, a, a bit, uh, then maybe that's a little, I always thought just like the exchanges just list another coin called the Satoshi.
• 41:06
  and it actually is just Bitcoin, but it's denominated Satoshi's, right? And it's like,
• 41:11
  look at this Satoshi coin. It's tracking Bitcoin precisely. It's the hottest new thing,
• 41:15
  but it's actually, they're just buying Bitcoin. They also, you know what I mean? They can exchange
• 41:19
  it for Bitcoin and it's just actually just an internal calculation within the exchange.
• 41:24
  I like that. All right, let's move on from age. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Race and this data
• 41:31
  different from what we found last year. Last year, we found slightly more likely to own Bitcoin
• 41:36
  if you're non-white.
• 41:38
  This year we found Hispanic-Latino ownership
• 41:41
  was considerably higher.
• 41:43
  And so was Pacific Islander, Native American, Black, and Asian.
• 41:48
  I don't really count the Pacific Islander, Native American numbers too much
• 41:51
  because that represents very few people who own Bitcoin in our sample
• 41:55
  and the error bars on those are huge.
• 41:58
  But I'm confident in the Hispanic-Latino one and the Black one
• 42:01
  as both considerably higher than white.
• 42:04
  And this matches other surveys in crypto. It also matches something we saw in the election last year, where Donald Trump gained significantly among young Hispanic men and even young black men from before. Yeah. And it matches, I think. Yeah, it matches other data from the industry.
• 42:23
  So tell me why you think that it skews that way.
• 42:26
  Because like my gut reaction, I actually think is a total mid curve take is that maybe like,
• 42:32
  especially when you look at the Hispanic Latino population, like, does this come down to maybe at some point they've used it for omissances and then understood what Bitcoin is?
• 42:40
  Or like, what do you think the reason for this is?
• 42:42
  I think it's different reasons for the black population and the Hispanic Latino population.
• 42:47
  But both related to financial privilege.
• 42:50
  I think the friends of mine who are from Latin America or have relatives there have a much easier time grokking the value of Bitcoin because they say, oh, yeah, I know when the Argentinian peso exploded or I had a family in Venezuela and they lost everything.
• 43:09
  Or, you know, they all know that or they've done a remittance with with black Americans.
• 43:15
  it's a history of distrust with banking. You know, something else that we showed in the signal
• 43:20
  poll really went into this is looking at trust of traditional financial institutions and correlating
• 43:25
  that with ownership of Bitcoin. And it's just as you would expect, the less you trust financial
• 43:29
  institutions, the more likely you are to own Bitcoin. So black people trust financial institutions
• 43:36
  in America less. And that's because a history of redlining, a history of discriminatory treatment
• 43:43
  on lending and, you know, dramatic things like Black Wall Street in Tulsa.
• 43:49
  So that memory doesn't fade.
• 43:53
  And I saw in the signal poll, if you say that you're a politician and you say you're supporting
• 43:59
  Bitcoin, 50% of Black Americans say that makes them more likely to vote for you.
• 44:06
  They were the single highest group in terms of expressing political support for politicians
• 44:11
  who say they back Bitcoin. And I think it's this entire history of mistrust.
• 44:18
  All right, cool. Let's go on to the next one.
• 44:19
  Okay. Political orientation and Bitcoin ownership. This year's results are very similar to last
• 44:27
  year's in the sense that Bitcoin owners look kind of like the rest of America. But on the
• 44:33
  sort of liberal and somewhat liberal, the numbers have dropped slightly and the numbers have jumped
• 44:39
  slightly on the somewhat conservative and conservative side. Basically, we've had a pivot
• 44:44
  around the middle, left to right. And we measured political orientation in four different ways. This
• 44:51
  is just one of them. The other ones showed at least this much shift, if not more. So we're
• 44:56
  pretty confident there was a rightward shift among Bitcoin owners. Which makes total sense with Trump
• 45:01
  and everything that's happened there. Which makes sense. And here's sentiment. It's just kind of the
• 45:06
  same theme, except now it's not whether you own Bitcoin, but what you think of Bitcoin,
• 45:10
  whether you think it's good. You can see in the gray is 2024 data and orange is 2025.
• 45:18
  Basically, on the left side of the political spectrum, we had a pretty big drop in sentiment
• 45:23
  towards Bitcoin. And on the right, it holds steady. It's interesting, though, that sentiment
• 45:29
  has dropped pretty much across the board while ownership's gone up. Yeah. Well, whether or not
• 45:34
  ownership has gone up is actually we don't take a stand on that because we changed our question.
• 45:40
  So we can't actually say whether ownership went up. What we can say is that when we ask the very
• 45:46
  same question again, which we did, we this time had a new qualifier in front of it, but we got
• 45:53
  a statistically indistinguishable answer. Where we get the increase from is from asking this
• 45:58
  question about how many do you own it in one of the following six ways.
• 46:04
  And so we don't know what the answer to that would have been last year.
• 46:07
  I see.
• 46:08
  I don't think that ownership is really up or we don't have any evidence that it's up.
• 46:12
  And so the interesting is price is up.
• 46:15
  In March, the average price of Bitcoin over that month was something like 84,000.
• 46:20
  And when we gathered our data before the period over which we gathered, it was around 40,000.
• 46:25
  So price of Bitcoin doubled between our two surveys. Also, ETFs exploded, becoming the best selling ETF in history, most rapid growth in history. We have the explosion of Treasury Company's micro strategy, ballistic. We, of course, Donald Trump won the election, announced a strategic Bitcoin reserve in an executive order.
• 46:47
  basically and then Operation Chokepoint 2.0 wound down. I mean, I can't even recount all of the wins.
• 46:57
  It was it's been an insane year of winning. And what's interesting is that all of that winning
• 47:04
  did not translate into necessarily broader ownership or sentiment. Sentiment went down
• 47:10
  slightly, but it went down a lot on the left and among women. And so I think that's kind of a I
• 47:15
  think that's kind of a red flag for us. And you might, it might be different now. This was March.
• 47:21
  Sentiment is not tracking price and it represents basically the shift of Bitcoin from a popular
• 47:31
  movement to an institutional and government asset. And some of that energy and momentum
• 47:38
  of previous bull cycles is not yet here. Maybe retail comes along now and it explodes,
• 47:44
  but they weren't there in March. I do wonder though, if there's another dynamic there. So
• 47:49
  like, I agree that this probably shows that Bitcoin is moving from like a grassroots movement
• 47:54
  to institutional movement, but does it, it could also be Bitcoin price ripping and salty no coiners
• 48:01
  getting pissed off at it? Of course. I mean, in another respect, like if we didn't have 2024 data
• 48:09
  and we were just looking at this,
• 48:11
  you see a center-right orientation of Bitcoin owners,
• 48:15
  mostly center, and then a little bit right of the country.
• 48:19
  And then you look at sentiment,
• 48:21
  and you see across the political spectrum,
• 48:24
  it's slightly below neutral,
• 48:26
  but not a whole lot of difference between left and right.
• 48:30
  And I would have said, wow, Bitcoin isn't political.
• 48:33
  That would be my headline.
• 48:34
  It's only because I have last year's data
• 48:36
  that I see the trend is actually negative.
• 48:39
  And I do think a lot of it is like, yeah, price is going up, but if you're not in, which 80% of the country is not in, then you're like, sons of bitches. They're getting rich and I'm not.
• 48:54
  Yeah, I think maybe sentiment's going to drop for a lot of these studies you do, as Bitcoin just goes to a million dollars. All right, let's keep it moving. What's the next one?
• 49:02
  Let's keep going. Basically, we found this last year, we found it again. Whether you trust Bitcoin,
• 49:08
  know about Bitcoin, think it's useful, or think it's good, highly correlates with owning Bitcoin.
• 49:14
  And those things all correlate with each other. And if you look at politics, it's gray and light
• 49:18
  gray in this chart. You can see these attitudes towards Bitcoin are slightly different among left
• 49:23
  and right. And then if you look at owners versus non-owners, which is orange versus gray, you see
• 49:29
  a massive difference. I mean, a truly huge difference. And this wipes out everything like
• 49:34
  age, gender, race, even combinations of age, gender, and race are still not as powerful a
• 49:41
  predictor as just knowing about Bitcoin. And that's our real headline. I think that comes down to,
• 49:47
  like, if you own Bitcoin, you probably understand what it is, so you have a better take on...
• 49:51
  Like, that one makes total sense to me. Yeah. I won't rehash the moral foundations
• 49:56
  profile in debt. Not changed a lot. But it hasn't changed at all. What we found last year,
• 50:01
  we do have a new name for it. We're calling it moral maximalism,
• 50:04
  where people who are Bitcoin owners tend to care about matters of purity, loyalty,
• 50:13
  proportionality, equality, just a lot and more than the average person. But they don't match
• 50:20
  the profiles of either liberals or conservatives. They have their own distinctive profile.
• 50:24
  Bitcoiners are good people.
• 50:27
  Bitcoiners, that's not what I want to say, because I keep getting called on that in the comments. It doesn't mean Bitcoiners are good. It means that they care more.
• 50:36
  They're just better than everyone else.
• 50:38
  They care more about certain issues or they express that care. It doesn't mean they actually follow through on it.
• 50:43
  finally uh attitudes towards a strategic crypto reserve or strategic bitcoin reserve
• 50:49
  if you just ask people the question straight up should we start this new thing called a strategic
• 50:55
  crypto reserve and start buying crypto with your tax dollars they mostly are neutral to negative on
• 51:02
  it however we also asked people another question which was the government is considering the u.s
• 51:08
  government is considering diversifying some of its $800 billion of gold into Bitcoin. If you were
• 51:15
  advising the government, how much gold would you advise them to convert to Bitcoin? And we gave
• 51:23
  them a slider going from zero to 100. The slider was initially set on 50, but if you didn't touch
• 51:29
  the slider, your vote was not counted. That was a couple hundred people. So you had to grab this
• 51:34
  slider and put it on the number you wanted. And what we found was that 80% of people put that
• 51:40
  number somewhere other than zero, with a median result of 10% and a mean result of 20%.
• 51:48
  So, and especially we found even like young people, young people much more likely to convert
• 51:55
  larger amounts of gold to Bitcoin than older people. But even among old people, we found
• 52:03
  like actually the gender thing was slightly reversed.
• 52:07
  Like women in general were very reluctant
• 52:09
  to go onto zero Bitcoin.
• 52:12
  And in particularly older women were off zero
• 52:15
  where old men, a lot of old men
• 52:16
  were just like straight on zero.
• 52:18
  And we think it's kind of like a risk tolerance
• 52:21
  or a risk thing flipped
• 52:23
  because it seems risky to be all in gold
• 52:26
  and not even 1% in Bitcoin.
• 52:28
  Ah, that's interesting.
• 52:29
  Yeah, so you had these like really confident
• 52:31
  Peter Schiff type older males were like zero. But women who in general are less risk tolerant
• 52:38
  were more friendly to us getting off zero in terms of Bitcoin. So our conclusion on this one
• 52:46
  was like, this issue is really tricky and very sensitive to how we frame the question.
• 52:51
  If you say like, would you like to be a part of this newfangled thing where we stack Bitcoin
• 52:55
  instead of gold, people are going to balk. But if we say, should we be entirely exposed with $800
• 53:02
  billion worth of gold and no Bitcoin, or should we get a little Bitcoin, then people want us to
• 53:07
  get off zero. Very interesting. And it also, compared to the first chart you showed there,
• 53:13
  I understand why people, especially people who don't own Bitcoin, would be reluctant to spend
• 53:17
  tax dollars on it. But this one makes loads more sense. Exactly. It's just diversifying holdings
• 53:23
  we already have we're massively overexposed to gold among uh assets yeah cool oh is that all the
• 53:31
  charts that's it okay perfect so so tell me like what's your takeaway from this troy compared to
• 53:38
  last year like what do you think is good what's bad what would you like to see change i mean uh
• 53:44
  i would i kept looking for the one-liner and this is what held me up the most writing the report i
• 53:48
  wanted like that one banger that was like the result and i don't think there is one i think it's
• 53:54
  that uh bitcoin you know is here to stay it has a very large constituency in the u.s you know 48
• 54:02
  million adults is uh not it's not going away and it's it's a force to be reckoned with politically
• 54:09
  um i i think even the self-custody number was really amazing and encouraging i think about the
• 54:17
  percentage of Bitcoiners that we talk to and know. You know, how many people are at a conference?
• 54:25
  How many people were in Vegas? Like 30,000? And that was a huge conference, right? 30,000 out of
• 54:33
  48 million is nothing. That's nothing. And that's not a random sample. That's people who can afford
• 54:40
  a ticket, who want to go to the conference and so on. If we think about the number of people on
• 54:44
  Bitcoin Twitter who are active on Bitcoin Twitter. I don't know what it is. At the most, it's 150,000,
• 54:53
  200,000 out of 48 million. I think surveys like this are really interesting because they
• 55:00
  get us to see the people we're not seeing. And we kind of realize that all of our opinions about
• 55:06
  what Bitcoin is politically or socially, we are all basing ours on the basis of a very skewed and
• 55:13
  very small sample. Yeah, it's really easy to think Bitcoin Twitter is Bitcoin. But there's a lot of
• 55:19
  people out there who will just own this thing and not think about it all day, every day. And I find
• 55:22
  that hard to understand. They own it. I do too. They own it. They own a small amount. They don't
• 55:29
  think they know that much about it. They don't fully understand it. They're busy with life.
• 55:37
  Don't have strong opinions about it. Don't want to talk about it. And they're the ones showing up
• 55:43
  in the survey. I think that the other thing that this data shows us is it's kind of a warning.
• 55:48
  It's like that dip in sentiment. I like your salt theory, Danny, but I think it's up to us
• 55:56
  to carry the message of Bitcoin forward to individuals, like through efforts like Ella's,
• 56:03
  through like what the Nakamoto Project is doing, Bitcoin Policy Institute,
• 56:06
  what Bitcoin did.
• 56:08
  This culture
• 56:09
  still hasn't found its place
• 56:14
  in the mainstream media.
• 56:16
  People are still not telling our stories
• 56:18
  the way we want to tell them.
• 56:19
  They're still telling them in negative ways.
• 56:22
  And that's showing up in the sentiment.
• 56:25
  And the same with a Donald Trump
• 56:26
  marriage of orange brands,
• 56:30
  the orange brand of Trump,
• 56:31
  the orange brand of Bitcoin.
• 56:33
  That's very powerful
• 56:34
  and we are seeing the effects of that.
• 56:37
  And we want Bitcoin to be,
• 56:38
  or I want Bitcoin to be anyway,
• 56:40
  a universal technology.
• 56:42
  If we understand that,
• 56:43
  we see it's not left or right.
• 56:45
  It's money for enemies
• 56:47
  and it's money for everyone.
• 56:50
  And so it's on us to carry that message forward
• 56:55
  and communicate it out to people.
• 56:56
  So, yeah, I see us like winning
• 56:59
  on all sorts of fronts,
• 57:01
  but I see these little trends
• 57:03
  that I'm concerned about
• 57:04
  and that we're tracking, you know, and that we can take action on.
• 57:09
  How funny that there's people out there who own Bitcoin
• 57:10
  who are just like touching grass and living their lives.
• 57:13
  What weirdos.
• 57:15
  Ella, so Troy's survey was obviously based solely in the US,
• 57:20
  but you've done this on a global scale with Cornell.
• 57:22
  Do you want to run through some of your slides and we'll see what's different?
• 57:25
  Yes, I will. I'll pull them up right now.
• 57:28
  I think that report's fascinating, Troy.
• 57:30
  Thanks, Danny.
• 57:31
  When's the next one?
• 57:32
  You said you were going to do these every quarter.
• 57:33
  is that still the plan we're definitely not going to do that okay i i basically i didn't pay myself
• 57:39
  anything for for for these so i i'm i'm i'm just doing them on my free time and that's not a lot
• 57:46
  and uh and we have to raise money for each one and so i mean i think annually is a much better
• 57:52
  seems more achievable for us yes all right ella you've been out in the cold for a minute there
• 57:58
  let's get into it yes so it's nice that most of our results uh that i'll share align very closely
• 58:05
  with what troy has just shared with their study um just a quick note of when our study was done
• 58:12
  so there's 2108 americans who were surveyed and it was done um in mid-december 2024 so there is a
• 58:21
  nice time chunk between troy when your uh survey was done most recently and when we did our numbers
• 58:27
  And we looked at 25 countries across all different regions, status of development, type of government.
• 58:39
  And when we started this, we looked at 178 different countries.
• 58:45
  And I can't take credit for this work.
• 58:47
  Three professors, Professor Sarah Kreps and two others, then scored all of those countries
• 58:53
  across about 15 different factors ranging from inflation remittances civil war civil unrest to then get to our 25 countries that we have today
• 59:05
  And one piece that isn't going to show up in the data that we'll run through is that
• 59:10
  in addition to these about 25,000 surveys, a little more, across these countries, we're
• 59:16
  also doing about 10 interviews for 250 total across all of the countries to help provide
• 59:24
  more nuance or stories that might otherwise be lost when we just have the data.
• 59:31
  Oh, that's very cool.
• 59:33
  Yeah, so it's really nice. And what's also nice about it is that we have about 15 students from
• 59:40
  the Cornell Bitcoin Club who are actually doing the interviews and getting to talk to people
• 59:45
  all around the world about how they're using Bitcoin or why they're not using Bitcoin and
• 59:52
  learning from that very interesting so just quickly like with these countries that you've
• 59:57
  picked um have you tried like so obviously the uk the us is in this but the uk is not is that is
• 1:00:03
  the thinking behind that that while different they're relatively similar and you want to make
• 1:00:07
  sure you hit lots of different audiences yeah and so that it comes up uh like even canada for
• 1:00:13
  instance isn't in this um but the us is and so it really comes back to just that scoring of all of
• 1:00:20
  the countries across the different factors. And then it was just basically ranked. And I think
• 1:00:25
  there was some tweaking and editing. But yes, in short, we wanted to try to be as representative
• 1:00:31
  as possible. And while it's a little different for Europe, we still have a decent number of
• 1:00:36
  countries. There's Italy, Poland, and then Switzerland, and then Russia and Ukraine,
• 1:00:41
  we added in as well. Makes sense. Okay, cool.
• 1:00:45
  Yes.
• 1:00:45
  It's a phenomenal data collection effort, Ella.
• 1:00:49
  Thank you.
• 1:00:49
  I mean, amazing. And also the qualitative part really does is valuable. And I can see that
• 1:00:56
  because so many people ask us why people are giving the answers they're giving. And I always
• 1:01:01
  have to just say, I don't know. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it's sort of a blessing and a curse
• 1:01:07
  because, um, professor Krebs and I have talked about this a lot recently. We have so much data
• 1:01:12
  and we have these interviews and the stories, but we want to be careful as well that we're not
• 1:01:16
  telling the wrong story or, you know, overbiasing on one thing versus another. But I'll show in one
• 1:01:24
  of these charts an example of where I think the interviews have come into helpful with that. But
• 1:01:30
  maybe just to dive in, this is a chart just showing Bitcoin awareness. So the question was,
• 1:01:37
  are you aware of Bitcoin? Yes or no? Then a question about knowledge. You self-rated on a
• 1:01:45
  scale of one to 10, how knowledgeable you are about Bitcoin. And then the final piece that's
• 1:01:50
  shown on here, which just for the sake of this chart, I titled understanding. But the question
• 1:01:57
  was basically about, do you know that there's only 21 million Bitcoin, that a supply cap exists?
• 1:02:03
  And I'll zoom in right now just to the US, but only about 5% of Americans know that Bitcoin has
• 1:02:12
  a supply cap of 21 billion bitcoin which is really low and so i know we were just speaking about
• 1:02:19
  um you know if you're aware versus if you own bitcoin i'm going to show that number two
• 1:02:24
  um you know we thought that owners of bitcoin might be more knowledgeable about bitcoin or
• 1:02:31
  really understand what they're owning um but as i mentioned our numbers showed that 49 million
• 1:02:37
  Americans own Bitcoin currently, but only 17 of that about know that there's even 21 million.
• 1:02:47
  And we're actually doing over the next 10 weeks, different data releases. And so tomorrow,
• 1:02:54
  we're going to release more context on, you know, do they think there's any supply cap? Do they think
• 1:03:00
  it's something else? And it's really shocking. So 128 million Americans who say they feel
• 1:03:05
  knowledgeable about Bitcoin are probably lying.
• 1:03:08
  Yeah.
• 1:03:09
  And, you know, I think there's that joke, like no one who understands the difficulty
• 1:03:13
  adjustment thinks Bitcoin's a bad idea or doesn't want to own it.
• 1:03:18
  And I feel we can lower the thresholds a little bit more and just say, do you know
• 1:03:22
  there's 21 million?
• 1:03:23
  There's a couple of things I want to interject here.
• 1:03:26
  One is that we tested financial literacy through a series of questions, like, you
• 1:03:33
  know, test questions, but not Bitcoin literacy. So I'm really glad you did that because we just
• 1:03:39
  went with basically subjective opinion on how much you take yourself to know about Bitcoin.
• 1:03:46
  Yeah, that's great. Because I think we would get a similar, I know a lot about finance would
• 1:03:51
  probably be a lot of people, but then when you actually ask them questions, they would fail these
• 1:03:56
  basic questions. We owe a lot of credit to, you know, Troy having your study out before we sent
• 1:04:02
  out the surveys, you know, other people revert the 1A1Z group. Like there's a lot of good work
• 1:04:08
  that people have done that we've been able to look at and leverage for how we drafted this.
• 1:04:13
  Totally. This chart makes total sense to me, though, because like whenever I'm talking to
• 1:04:17
  people, if they ask what I do and I tell them I'm into Bitcoin, no one really says what's that.
• 1:04:22
  But I feel like very, very few people understand it. This just shows how much work we've still got
• 1:04:26
  to do. Yeah. One other thing we did was when we asked about the trust, whether you trust Bitcoin,
• 1:04:31
  We had four questions. One of them was like, do you trust it as an investment over time to hold value? And another one was, do you trust the truth of the Bitcoin record of what exchanges have taken place?
• 1:04:44
  Yeah. And those responses were almost identical in our survey. That's like wildly different. Nobody should distrust on the second one. And the other one is controversial, but they just tracked exactly like people don't know yet, Ella, the point of your thesis that Bitcoin's a language aimed at truth. They don't know that basic point either.
• 1:05:05
  Yeah. And just a quick aside. So we also asked these questions for general financial knowledge. Actually, there was a couple of questions under that. And then we did the same for crypto awareness, knowledge, and then stable coins as well. And so that's just other data that's out there that we can share.
• 1:05:25
  But moving on to ownership. And so this chart here is showing current Bitcoin ownership across the 25 countries, as well as have you ever owned Bitcoin across the 25 countries?
• 1:05:39
  And the reason I wanted to make sure to include both of them here is that for China and Hong Kong, we could not ask, do you currently own Bitcoin?
• 1:05:50
  And so that's why it's zero here in this chart.
• 1:05:54
  But I think it's helpful context to just show where the numbers are under the have you ever owned Bitcoin question.
• 1:06:01
  and so if you look at this the U.S. is over here kind of in the latter right half of Bitcoin
• 1:06:11
  ownership which again is just interesting putting it in context of other studies the River report I
• 1:06:17
  was mentioning that showed you know just how much or how dominant Americans are in the Bitcoin
• 1:06:23
  ecosystem or at least how it appears and zooming in again currently about 49 million Americans own
• 1:06:30
  Bitcoin. But over the course ever, the number is about 95 million Americans.
• 1:06:37
  That's really interesting. The El Salvador one on the previous charts, interesting too,
• 1:06:41
  at one point is over like 75% of people had owned Bitcoin and now it's below 30.
• 1:06:46
  Yeah, yeah. Ben, I think obviously we know some impacts onto why that is. And so that's again,
• 1:06:53
  you know, to why the interviews are helpful. And on that note, if it's in, we can certainly go back,
• 1:06:59
  but we also asked about custody and trust. And I'm just going to go out of order for the sake of
• 1:07:05
  this. But in terms of trust in Bitcoin, so I think, Troy, you mentioned that your number,
• 1:07:10
  was it about 4.9 or somewhere, I think, close to that of trust or how Americans rated their trust
• 1:07:18
  in Bitcoin? And in our study, it came up at 3.43 right next to South Korea. And a couple of the
• 1:07:27
  interviews in South Korea, people were saying how they really distrusted Bitcoin, crypto,
• 1:07:34
  Web3 because of Do Kwon and Terra Luna and that crash. And so I sort of wonder,
• 1:07:41
  and we actually haven't done the US interviews yet, but I wonder if we're going to get,
• 1:07:46
  you know, FTX, SPF coming up in those. And if that's, you know, any reason for this.
• 1:07:52
  I'm sure they will come up. The interesting thing on this chart, so this is trust in Bitcoin for
• 1:07:55
  anyone listening um and we have japan with the lowest trust nigeria with the highest trust but
• 1:08:00
  you can almost go down this list and be like how bad is your fiat currency and the worst the current
• 1:08:07
  the fiat currency is the better the trust in bitcoin is with a few exceptions though like
• 1:08:11
  it's interesting to see the uae with such high trust in bitcoin yes and just while we're talking
• 1:08:16
  that and you know how bad is your currency for the question of you know do you correctly know
• 1:08:22
  there's only 21 million Bitcoin. Switzerland was the highest with 25 point something of that nature.
• 1:08:29
  And they have a relatively good currency compared to others.
• 1:08:33
  Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, they do no money.
• 1:08:38
  And they've been such early adopters in terms of Bitcoin, crypto and regulations especially. So
• 1:08:43
  maybe that's why. And this just gets into the blessing and curse of having so much information
• 1:08:48
  in the interviews and can we do our best job in telling the story accurately?
• 1:08:54
  And then the final piece that I wanted to share was custody.
• 1:08:58
  And so this chart, it's maybe a little daunting when you first glance at it, but the piece
• 1:09:03
  that I think is interesting to focus on is the red, and that's for people that say they
• 1:09:08
  hold Bitcoin in a hardware wallet.
• 1:09:10
  So self-custody, but with a physical hardware wallet.
• 1:09:14
  And again, we don't have this data for Hong Kong or China.
• 1:09:16
  but mexico is the highest and then the u.s is a bit in the middle um zooming in though for the u.s
• 1:09:26
  uh troy similar to you higher than 11 million but about 15 million americans use a hardware wallet
• 1:09:33
  damn which that's wild yeah yeah so there's question on you know of course uh you know
• 1:09:42
  Troy, you brought up looking at the numbers of sales, but I think it's reassuring to know that
• 1:09:46
  these studies done pretty close in time together have reasonably close numbers as well.
• 1:09:53
  I just wonder what people mean by hardware wallet. You know, this is the impossible thing
• 1:09:58
  about surveys, right? You'd never know if the way you intend the question to be interpreted is the
• 1:10:03
  way they're taking it. I think 14.8 million Americans using a hardware wallet, given the
• 1:10:12
  ledger has only sold 8 million cumulatively and trezor 2 million and maybe the rest is a million
• 1:10:18
  or two that would require that basically all of those wallets in the world are um in america and
• 1:10:28
  the one user per wallet and and both of those seem seem suspect and i wonder i mean i'm my first
• 1:10:35
  wallet was just my computer because I had the wallet.dat file on Bitcoin.
• 1:10:44
  You're an OG here though, Troy.
• 1:10:45
  So, you know, like, was that a hardware wallet? It's hardware. I don't know. I think so. But
• 1:10:52
  the term hardware wallet didn't even exist back then. I don't know. If I didn't know what a ledger
• 1:11:00
  or Trezor was, how would I interpret that question?
• 1:11:03
  Like maybe I've got it on my phone and I'm like, yeah, phone's hardware.
• 1:11:07
  It's a wallet.
• 1:11:08
  It's on my phone, right?
• 1:11:10
  Anyway, I think it's a great number.
• 1:11:12
  It's an awesome number.
• 1:11:13
  I really wonder what people mean.
• 1:11:16
  Same exact question about our own characterization of self-custody.
• 1:11:20
  Yeah.
• 1:11:21
  And I will say part of this other bucket, we asked self-custody digital wallet.
• 1:11:27
  and so we at least have that distinction as well but i just lumped that into other because there's
• 1:11:35
  uh just for right now how we'll present it um wanted to highlight the numbers for etf exchange
• 1:11:41
  and hardware wallet but at least we did ask you know is it hardware or is it your mobile wallet
• 1:11:47
  or digital well that's really interesting and can you just go back to that previous chart ella
• 1:11:52
  yes um which one because uh the custody one this one yeah because this this is like what we were
• 1:11:59
  talking about before when it's very easy to think that bitcoin twitter is bitcoin uh the thing that
• 1:12:04
  surprises me in here is just how dominant mexico is like the vastly more people using a hardware
• 1:12:10
  wallet in mexico than anywhere else poland kenya sw i mean switzerland they love a swiss bank
• 1:12:15
  um but like these aren't the countries i would expect to be at the top of that which is very
• 1:12:20
  interesting. No. And you know, what's also interesting is that I'm going a little bit
• 1:12:24
  off recollection, but I believe Mexico in terms of awareness is very low. Yes. Okay. So if you
• 1:12:31
  look over here, Mexico is in last in terms of understanding of the 21 million supply cap. And
• 1:12:39
  then this is not ordered, but I believe they're the bottom three in terms of awareness of Bitcoin.
• 1:12:46
  super interesting so you're either unaware of it or you have it in a hardware wallet
• 1:12:51
  it's like the divide in the society yeah it's really cool um it's very useful very useful to
• 1:13:01
  to know that you know what i what i said to a lot of my critics online was like look i i don't know
• 1:13:06
  exactly what people meant by self-custody they took themselves to have bitcoin in self-custody
• 1:13:10
  OK, I didn't make up the data. It's 11 million Americans who said I have it in self-custody.
• 1:13:16
  Yours are even higher. So that's a that's a political constituency.
• 1:13:21
  Even if, you know, if you're a ledger and you're looking at it and you're wondering how many hardware wallets you've sold or can sell, you might not be able to trust it as much.
• 1:13:28
  But if you're a politician saying we're going to treat people who have hardware wallets like their banks and make them collect information on all the transactions that, you know, then, you know, you've got a real constituency.
• 1:13:40
  and it doesn't really matter if people don't quite understand it.
• 1:13:44
  I was going to add, we asked, you know, in the most recent election, because this was done after
• 1:13:49
  the election, did you vote for Harris or Trump? And I believe it was 47% said they voted for Harris
• 1:13:56
  and 50% for Trump and 3% for other. And so it's pretty even split. Yeah, pretty even split.
• 1:14:04
  very that is interesting um you know when it comes down to bitcoin is actually holding bitcoin
• 1:14:11
  in self-custody is there a way that you could use like on-chain data to substantiate the claims
• 1:14:16
  you're making here we we had that uh criticism lobbed at us by uh some people online and i think
• 1:14:24
  uh yeah you can criticize our numbers here because you could just look at the number of wallets
• 1:14:30
  that hold non-dust levels of Bitcoin.
• 1:14:35
  And I don't know where you draw that threshold exactly,
• 1:14:38
  but the 11 million looks like it's a considerable percentage
• 1:14:43
  of all the wallets at the non-dust level already.
• 1:14:46
  And we know that a lot of wallets are held by exchanges,
• 1:14:50
  ETFs and institutions and businesses.
• 1:14:53
  So, and we know that people have a lot of wallets,
• 1:14:56
  like have more than one wallet.
• 1:14:57
  So looking at, I think it's tricky looking at on-chain data to try to determine how many people, you know, hold Bitcoin in self-custody.
• 1:15:10
  Do people consider lightning self-custody?
• 1:15:13
  Well, there are forms of it that are and forms of it that aren't.
• 1:15:16
  But things will show up in different forms that are going to be called self-custody or not.
• 1:15:23
  But it's another great data point.
• 1:15:24
  And once I saw that criticism, I was like, that would have been a really nice part of our report, actually, to put the on-chain data there against the self-reported numbers.
• 1:15:34
  Yeah, because, again, it's just down to how people actually interpret the question and their understanding of the question.
• 1:15:40
  Yeah. And for ours, what we also asked is what percent of your savings is in Bitcoin as well as other assets.
• 1:15:46
  And then we also have when did you first buy Bitcoin?
• 1:15:50
  And so I imagine compared with on-chain, that would also help us, you know, back into that or get closer to the correct data.
• 1:15:59
  Well, this has been really interesting.
• 1:16:01
  I think, again, like I said, just to reiterate the point, it makes it very clear that what I may sometimes think of as Bitcoin is not actually, or as Bitcoiners, is not actually who Bitcoiners are.
• 1:16:12
  It's way broader than I think I probably imagined.
• 1:16:17
  I think so.
• 1:16:18
  from your takeaway i asked troy the same question like what surprised you in this what was a sort of
• 1:16:23
  standout piece of data you collected i mean i was shocked by how many people aren't aware of 21
• 1:16:29
  million because i just for myself i just feel like it was the main point that helped me connect
• 1:16:36
  the dots and understand why i why i own bitcoin and to see how few people know that um that was
• 1:16:46
  really shocking to me and i think it's also it's so easy to share that and explain it and so again
• 1:16:53
  troy was talking about you know what's our responsibility what can we do um you know that
• 1:16:58
  that's a very easy thing that we can do to help others understand bitcoin we've got a lot of work
• 1:17:03
  to do i think i need to do a podcast with parker lewis on 21 million um but i massively appreciate
• 1:17:09
  the time the work like it's incredible the two the two surveys are very very interesting thank
• 1:17:14
  you guys so much. Before we close out though, where do you want to send anyone? Ella, you kick
• 1:17:18
  us off. Sure. Well, for myself, speaking of 21 million, my handle is 2121mm for the 21st.
• 1:17:27
  But then for all things for the study, we are open sourcing all the data, everything as it comes
• 1:17:32
  out just on cornellbitcoinclub.org or the Twitter handle. And so over the next 10 weeks, we're going
• 1:17:40
  to share data. So if people want to stay up to date to that, then I would recommend checking there.
• 1:17:46
  And Troy, I'm at the TroCro, T-H-E-T-R-O-C-R-O, Twitter. And you can also follow the
• 1:17:55
  Nakamoto Project at nakamotoproject.org. Amazing. Well, thank you both so much the time. Really
• 1:18:01
  appreciate it, guys. And Ella, I do want to do a podcast with you on your thesis. We'll do that
• 1:18:07
  at some point. Please send it to me and I'll read it and we can do that. I will. Thank you so much
• 1:18:10
  for having me. All right, cool. Thank you, Danny. I'm so honored to be on Ella's first
• 1:18:15
  What Bitcoin Did appearance, which I can hardly believe. There you go. And there's going to be
• 1:18:20
  more for sure. Thanks, guys. Thanks. Thank you.
• 1:18:40
  Thank you.