Hey everybody, welcome back to TCB for another TCB short. For the short today, we're gonna be tackling the question, does Bitcoin unfairly benefit early adopters? So people say that Bitcoin is unfair because early adopters got rich. And to that I'd say, well, good, they should have. Because if you think that's unfair, then you're really gonna hate how the rest of the financial system works. So let's get something straight. Nobody complains about early investors in Amazon. Nobody cries about early Apple shareholders. Nobody calls it unfair that early investors in Uber or Facebook, you know, built generational wealth. So we celebrate them. We call them visionaries. We call them financially intelligent. We envy them for taking risk. We applaud them for being, quote-unquote, early. but when it comes to Bitcoin, the same exact dynamic, now it's unfair, and that's clearly a double standard. So here's the real question. Was Bitcoin accessible? Because fairness isn't about equality of outcome, it's about equality of opportunity. So you couldn't invest in, early in Facebook or Uber unless you were connected. You couldn't get into venture capital deals without status. You can't access IPO allocations without institutional privilege. However, when it comes to Bitcoin, there are no gatekeepers. There's no minimums for investment. There's no insider funding rounds. It's just open source code that was released to the internet. So if you had Wi-Fi, you had access. So that's not unfair. That's more open than almost any asset in all of financial history. So, uh, let's just ad- address the uncomfortable truth. Bitcoin wasn't hidden. It was ignored. Because understanding Bitcoin takes effort. You have to question how money works. You have to learn things most people were never taught about economics. You have to sit with uncertainty. You have to go against the crowd and be a contrarian, and you have to face ridicule for doing that. That's work, and it's work that most people don't want to do. It's easier to just dismiss Bitcoin, laugh at it, scroll past it, than it is to actually understand it. So people didn't miss Bitcoin because they couldn't gain access to it. Everyone had access to it. They missed it because economic education requires effort, and it's effort that most people don't want to put in. So let's talk about real unfairness. Not Bitcoin, but the system that we're currently living in. Since 1971, when the US left the gold standard, uh, money hasn't been constrained. It can be created at will. And over time, because of that, what do we see? The middle class is shrinking. The top takes more. The wealth gap widens. And today, the top 1% owns roughly a third of all wealth, while the bottom 50% own almost nothing. That didn't happen by accident. Let's zoom in to exactly how this played out. In 2008, the Federal Reserve balance sheet was about$900 billion. And then after years of money printing since that time, it's gone to over$9 trillion. So that's a 10X expansion over just a little more than a decade. So trillions of dollars created and injected into the system. But here's the key question. Who got this money first?'Cause it's not you, and it's not me. This new money enters through banks and financial markets and government channels. So what happens? Asset prices rise, stocks rise, real estate rises, and wages lag behind. They always lag behind. And by the time the money actually reaches most people, the prices of all the goods are already higher, but your wages have not increased. So if you own assets, you win. If you rely on income, you fall behind. So that's the system. It's engineered to exploit the working man. So let's simplify this. The Bitcoin criticism, early adopters win. The fiat reality is that insiders win, not once, but continuously. They always win, and at your and my expense. So why is Bitcoin different? Bitcoin removes that entire exploitative structure. There is no central issuer. There is no money printer. There is no preferential access. It's just a fixed supply asset with transparent rules that are known to all and can be accessed by all. So you don't win because you're connected. You win simply because you choose to participate, and anyone can choose to participate. And here's the most important thing that people are still missing. This isn't over. It's not even close to over. It's still, quote-unquote,"early." Globally, the majority of people still don't own Bitcoin. Institutional adoption in Bitcoin is still in its very early stage. Nation-states are only beginning to engage with Bitcoin. So we're not at the end of this adoption cycle. We're still at the beginning of global Bitcoin monetization. Because when you actually zoom out and think in terms of total addressable market Bitcoin is still early by almost every meaningful measure. So let's be precise. Bitcoin today is not the global unit of account. It's not the global medium of exchange. It's not the dominant store of value. But it has the potential to be all of those things. It's still competing at the margin with gold and sovereign debt and real estate and equities and parts of the global monetary base itself, currencies. So let's think about that total addressable market. Global stores of value conservatively represent hundreds of trillions of dollars. The estimate is about, uh, one quadrillion dollars, a giant number. So gold is about thirty-four trillion dollars now. Global real estate is well over three hundred trillion. Bonds and sovereign debt are another three hundred trillion. The monetary base and bank deposits is about a hundred trillion, and global equities are also about a hundred trillion. So Bitcoin today is only one point five trillion compared to that one quadrillion dollars of store value assets globally. So it's just a small fraction of that system, which means something very simple. We're not talking about a saturated asset, even though we've seen the price rise so much. We're talking about a monetization phase that is very s-- that's still very early in global terms. Early doesn't necessarily mean cheap anymore. Early means that the adoption curve is forming, the global allocation is incomplete, institutional positioning is st- inst- institutional positioning is still in progress, and most importantly, the educational phase is still ongoing. People are still trying to figure out exactly what Bitcoin is and what it means for the global financial system. But here's the truth that nobody likes hearing. Most people don't miss Bitcoin because they were too late. They miss it because they don't do the work to understand it early enough, and that same dynamic still exists today. The educational effort required isn't gone, it's just shifted somewhat. So now it's not what is Bitcoin. I think now most people are aware of Bitcoin, at least conceptually what Bitcoin is. But now it's, do I understand Bitcoin well enough to allocate intelligently in a world where it's becoming a global monetary asset? And that question is still open, and that's what makes it early. So yes, some people are ahead now, and some people were, quote-unquote, early and got rich. But globally, we are still in the phase where most capital Most institutions and most individuals have not fully engaged yet. So this means that the opportunity isn't gone. It's just no longer kind of cheap or effortless. And historically, that's exactly where the largest wealth transfers happen. Not at the very beginning of awareness, but during the long middle period where conviction separates those who studied it from those who ignored it. So when people say that Bitcoin is unfair because early adopters won, they're missing the point. It's not that early adopters won. It's that we are still early enough that the educational effort still matters. So in a world where trillions in addressable value are still being repriced, there's still time to do that work. There's still time to understand it. And there's still time to become what people will later call a quote-unquote early adopter. So people don't hate Bitcoin because it's inherently unfair. It's just mathematics. It's about the fairest system you could possibly devise. They hate it because it rewarded people who understood it before they did. And there's still enough time for you to become one of those people that understood it before the vast majority of others. So I hope that helps y'all. Take care till next time. And we'll see you.